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About this project

This is a place for people to share stories, memories, and images of cleaning house. Please follow us, participate and connect:

Share a cleaning story

Pick one or more of the prompts below. Submit text or photos in response.

Click on a prompt to see responses posted by others.

1. What’s your favorite cleaning task? Why?

2. What's your least favorite cleaning task? Why?

3. When you think of your mother (or grandmother) cleaning, what do you see her doing?

4. When you think of your father (or grandfather) cleaning, what do you see him doing?

5. When you think of cleaning, what image comes to mind? Take a photograph that approximates this mental image.

6. Pull out the cleaning supplies, tools, and products under your sink (or wherever you keep them). Take a group portrait of them.

7. Do you have any unique or unusual cleaning tools? Take a photograph and write a short caption describing what it is.

8. Think of the last time you cleaned house. Take a moment to remember the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations associated with that experience. Describe what you did and how you felt.

9. Take “before” and “after” photographs of a room, or part of a room, that you clean.

10. What does cleaning represent in your life?

11. How would/do you feel about hiring someone to clean your house?

12. How would/do you feel about being employed to clean other people’s houses?

13. Take a photograph of what’s in your kitchen sink right now.

14. Is there something culturally specific about the way you clean or your relationship to cleaning? Explain.

15. Do you have any recurring arguments with family members or housemates about cleaning? Describe.

16. Describe a memory about cleaning when you were a child.

17. Take a series of photographs of an area in your house, such as a table, your dish rack, your bed or bedroom floor, one a day, for nine days. Take the photographs from the same angle, so that the space doesn’t change, just the objects in it. You don’t have to do it on consecutive days, just whenever you think of it.

 

My mother worked in a factory when my brother and I were very young. Because my mother worked, I cleaned. And she was tough! Well, being Japanese is very persnickety, right? I would clean during the week, but then on the weekends, she would take a toothbrush out and scrub between the tiles. I mean, it was craziness. I was raised in a housing project and everything around us was just, ugh, really nasty, but when you walked into our house you really felt as though it was a different world.

For my mother, cleaning represented control over her life, because everything else around her was falling apart. And for me, I suppose, it's pretty much the same. Cleaning is like religion. Once you’ve been conditioned, that's it. You're not even thinking about it after a while. It becomes an automatic activity.

-Janice

Photos and text from the forthcoming book "Cleaning: People Talk About Housework"