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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.

 

Thursday
Oct182012

Adele Horne

Adele Horne has been making documentary films for 17 years. Her film The Tailenders was broadcast nationally on P.O.V. and won an Independent Spirit Award. The New York Times described The Tailenders thus: “This gorgeous, inspired and gutsy film…opens up new ideological vistas on religion, technology and globalization. It dares viewers not to be surprised by it.” Adele’s films have screened in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America. Adele received an MFA in Art from the University of California, San Diego and a BA from Williams College. She is a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts, School of Film/Video.

Wednesday
Oct172012

Karin Johansson

Karin Johansson is a Swedish photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally. Johansson’s photographic series provide intimate glimpses into people’s private worlds. Photographing her subjects when they are at home, or relaxed with friends, she captures how individual personalities intersect with social context. Johansson received an MFA in Photography at California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Gothenburg University in Sweden. Johansson is an educator at Moorpark College Photography Department.