S2, Episode 7: Staging Home

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Transcript

Ana Baeza: In this episode we throw a more reflective glance at how we’ve been discussing home during this podcast. The focus on the home has arguably been one of the cornerstones of COVID across much of the scholarly and mainstream media during this period and we want to keep thinking about the ways in which the household has become normalised during COVID-19. In the coming series we will carry on decoupling these ideas of home with what might be seen as a complacent middle class ideology, but in this bonus episode of Season 2 we want to go to the heart of this phenomenon of making home cultures public.

How do acts of staging home effect how we understand domestic spaces and specifically what is the relationship here between the curation of private domestic space and public sharing? How do museums like MoDA position themselves in relation to these imaging practices of home and to guide us we’re going to be talking about a somewhat enigmatic and interesting collection The Location Finder collection of photographs here at MoDA which reached the museum in 2004 and it captures domestic scenes in London from the 1980s to the 2000s. So this will be the prompt for thinking about how forums visualising the home have changed in the shift from analogue to digital media.

We’ll also be talking about popular visual media that has informed visions of domesticity in the past such as magazines, film, to move onto the present discussions around digital self-curation of images of home through platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. And joining us today to discuss all of this is Dr Liz Stainforth from the University of Leeds. Welcome Liz.

Liz Stainforth: Thanks.

Ana: Liz is a lecturer in heritage studies at Leeds and researches digital heritage collections and cultures of utopia and memory.

Staging home: the Location Finder Collection

Ana: OK so I think just before we start I wanted to give some background to the Location Finder collection because it’s somewhat unusual and that’s part of what got us excited about it when we found out about it about half a year ago. So this is a collection that comprises hundreds of photographs of homes in London. They were taken by Garance Rawinsky who worked as a location manager for Thames Television and also as a freelancer. The homes pictured are from across London. They include Wimbledon, Harlow, but there’s quite a lot of homes in West London and also in the South West around Putney. They also include a variety of homes from semi-detached homes to flats and council estates.

And so you get a real range of different images so I’ll just give two examples of some of the homes that are pictured in this collection. There’s one particular home in SW15, so that’s in Putney and there’s a lot of details; so from the details of different wallpapers in the room to the mantelpiece to sometimes in the distance images of the people that would have lived in those homes. In this particular house in Putney it has a period style. You can see paintings that are traditional English landscapes. And it contrasts very much with some of the other parts of the collection, say the Delgarno Estate in W10, so that’s in West London in which you can see a much smaller house, you don’t have the bedrooms pictured, so only some spaces have been included within these images

So clearly much more affordable furniture and also more sparse within the decoration of the home. You have all these traces of life of the people that would have lived in that estate but often the people in these homes are absent from the pictures. So this kind of creates a lot of, I think, interest in terms of thinking about what these lives in these homes would have been but also how they are pictured and how Garance was undertaking that task. I’m interested Liz in also knowing what interested you about this collection.

Liz: Yeah I think we’ve had quite a lot of conversations about the collection and it was you that first introduced me to the Location Finder collection at MoDA. So initially I found the idea of the profession itself very interesting. I had been aware that this kind of work was undertaken and people would go around photographing different landscapes or different interiors, so TV producers would do this when they were trying to think about how they were going to stage, I suppose, the sets for their programmes if they wanted to go on location.

But to find a collection that was of these images from the photographer, I guess the photographer had collected these images because it was she that had photographed these particular locations, I found that really interesting because it provided the opportunity for cross-comparison. And so it wasn’t so much that it was the programme itself that defined what sets or locations were chosen but it was actually the photographer and her profession, you know where she’d been basically, her journey as well. So that idea of the profession did fascinate me and kind of got me thinking was there a relationship between the photographer and the different homeowners. I don’t think that’s something that’s totally clear and actually perhaps it wasn’t completely the case but what gave me that initial idea was also the photographs themselves.

When we looked at some of the collection they were quite, to me and to my eyes I suppose, quite intimate portraits of the home oddly. So even though they were taken in a professional context as potential locations for television programmes I had this sort of strong sense that they were quite intimate portraits of home, even though there weren’t often people in them. I mean there are some figures that sometimes appear almost incidentally but the idea really is to take a picture of the space. But what was quite intimate about them was that they really did have a lived in look. In terms of this question of staging the home they didn’t resemble what you’d imagine as a sort of empty stage set, it was really as if the people just kind of stepped out of the frame for a second, their everyday lives were very much in motion I felt in the photographs and I suppose I found myself filling in a lot of the details of what their living situations might be by looking at the different photographs and of course filling those in with my own assumptions as well.

So it was that that really initially drew me to the collection, this idea of a professional context in which something quite intimate in a way is being explored or you know now looking at it as a museum collection inviting exploration I think.

Ana: Yeah and I think what you’re saying about the intimacy of these photographs: it reminds me of one of the particular images from the collection which is from High Path Estate, so it’s one of the estates in London, actually there is a little note that says, ‘Laura’s flat’ so you already get sort of signposted into thinking that someone lives there and then you’re looking at these images which is only of the kitchen, and then you have the living room and in that living room the television is turned on. So I was thinking about what you were saying someone has just stepped out of the picture and I think that is the quality of many of these images because there’s something about them that exceeds what the image represents. And I think there’s something there about a prompt for maybe thinking about the stories that are part of what it means to live in that space and to occupy that space.

And in that same scene of the living room there is also another detail that caught my attention which is there’s a baby milk bottle just in the middle of the living room but there’s no one else. So that there is kind of all this I guess presence around an object that had it not been there it would have just changed the meaning of that photograph entirely. And I think it’s interesting that Garance was taking actively these decisions to picture these images in a way that they seem so unfiltered and so unstaged in a way, even if paradoxically they were aimed for the staging of the home through series. And I think that relates to talking a bit more about the why of this collection and how it was put together. So Garance was working over this period from the 1980s to the 2000s and as you said she was scouting for these potential locations. And I think one of the interesting things that comes out of the way she was approaching this and how maybe also the profession has changed in that respect that she emphasised when we interviewed her the trust that she would build with people that she would come into contact with. So she would often approach them by letter obviously there were not many emails at the time, so after that she would then enter into some sort of contact with people and then people she said would be honoured to have her come into the house and take images of the home. But sometimes it would be much more serendipitous, so she’d be walking around an area say in West London, and she would approach people in the street. So it’s interesting to see how that there was an element of spontaneity that I think maybe does come across in the photographs.

She also has described how the process of taking the images once inside the houses was very quick. she’d cover about seven properties in one day. She also had an Olympus lens of 35mm which has no focus, it has no panoramic facilities so it just allows you to take very simple shots. And I think that adds to that spontaneous, unfiltered quality of the images which I think differs from the ways in which we see how home has been pictured in other contexts, particularly thinking about how home might be staged more recently through social media. So I think that’s one of the really interesting aspects of this collection.

Liz:  Yeah definitely. And I think what we’ve both indicated there is that there’s a lot of personal life that’s left in, that hasn’t been filtered out of those photos and personal information or things that could be translated into personal information as well. So I think that’s something that’s really interesting to consider with this collection having found its way into MoDA, a museum context how you consider public and private circulation now that it’s part of a museum collection. Because obviously it was striking to me that there was a lot of private life on display in these photos. I had the sense that obviously as potential locations they would be seen by people outside of the home context and through a different lens. But now the collection, being a sort of collection that’s used for these kind of commercial purposes, having found its way into the museum: that raises a different set of questions, I think, in relation to kind of public and private lives and begins to also I suppose come into dialogue with the politics and logic of display of the museum context as well. So I just wondered from your perspective as curator if you had a sense of how the curators negotiated this in collections of the home because I think it is something you’re thinking about at the moment in relation to this collection?

Preserving privacy

Ana: Well it’s interesting this question I think Liz because there are other projects that have been concerned with housing and there’s one particularly that comes to mind which is a tower block UK project which was conducted by Edinburgh University and it’s really interesting because what they’ve done is a searchable online archive in which you can find a number of tower blocks across the UK. And that actually was very helpful for me in the process of locating some of the council estates that were pictured in the Location Finder collection, to see where these existed still. But the interesting thing with this project is that it focuses on emphasising the heritage and architectural importance of social housing and to make this accessible to everybody through this searchable archive. But all the images here are of exteriors of buildings.

So I think in terms of what you’re saying about the relation between private and public there is a relation between the inside and the outside of buildings and what’s distinctive about the Location Finder is that you also get that inside perspective into people’s homes, as well as exterior shots. Now if we were to disseminate some of these images, at the moment we could only be publicly using the exterior shots of these images. When it comes to the uses of the interiors this can only happen in a classroom setting with students, in which we also make them aware of the sensitivities of the data, the personal information that is contained in those images. And we need to redact that personal information. So then if we think of how we’re working online at the moment mostly through teaching at universities, that actually raises a further issue because we can’t actually then use these images in an online context. And I think this is interesting to think how museums are positioned, in this particular scenario which is very different to the way in which people might be exposing their interiors through social media and other kind of platforms. So I think that’s something that MoDA, as any other museum that would be undertaking a similar project needs to grapple with is that distinction between public or private but at a moment where in other contexts that division has also become a lot more loose and eroded. So it’s an interesting dilemma

Liz: Yeah definitely. I think it’s something that’s interesting to think about more in relation to digital collections as well because of course the Location Finder collection is analogue and I know there’s been some thought gone into whether it’s possible to digitise the collection and that isn’t going to be happening imminently but even if some images were digitised you would still have all of those ethical considerations and in a sense a kind of insider and outsider set of guidelines for how you can display the collection as well which you highlighted there in terms of what you can show for educational purposes versus what you can put on public display. So I think all of that is a really, you know these are all really interesting things to consider.`

Ana:  Yeah absolutely and it also makes me think of how in a way when I’ve been looking through these images because I think I haven’t seen anything really that compares to that level of intimacy what it’s compared to me more is actually to maybe narrated descriptions of the home and I was particularly thinking of one book by Danny Miller, The Comfort Of Things which was an account of different homes in London, it’s 30 households that he researches and he goes and speaks to the people that live in each of these households. And obviously there’s also ethical considerations in the case of ethnographic research that he’s undertaking but it’s interesting that there is… that when it comes to kind of visually exposing intimacy and the custodianship of images we enter into quite different conversations than when it’s say the stories that people are communicating through this research that Danny Miller collections in The Comfort Of Things. And I think it’s interesting how the role of visuality I think in this context as opposed to other forms of communicating intimacy or narrating home and private lives.

Representing the ‘real’ in the home

Liz: You were saying I think, just thinking about the contrast with Location Finder and I think this is so interesting that Garance had explained that she was aiming for minimal intervention, which is very interesting to me because you can see that definitely. That corresponds with what you can see sometimes but I suppose minimal intervention also connotes something that’s quite sparse, I don’t know I’ve got a kind of association in my mind, you know the idea of minimal intervention is like somebody in a sense not being there, going into the house when someone’s out, which obviously wasn’t the case here. So what was her perspective on that in terms of like I suppose you related to her your interest in the photos, how did she explain that kind of minimal intervention or pursuit of real life that she was aiming for?

Ana: The way in which Garance described this process was she had an interest in capturing the texture of life, the texture of place, of character and this could even be the textural quality of the space, so she wouldn’t be using any lighting. As I said she had a camera that was, that couldn’t really, you couldn’t really do much with that camera in terms of making heavily composed or panoramic scenes. So there’s a very kind of unpolished, dirty quality to the images in so far as they’re not smooth, you see kind of cracks, that help you imagine what else might  be in that image that isn’t just what’s visually represented, right. and this was just making me think of something I was reading recently that was in a book by Susan Fraiman it’s called Extreme Domesticity and she’s talking about the relationship between domesticity and home and literature and the way in which messiness and disorder it’s kind of open to narrative spaces that are messier are more narratable or they kind of lend themselves to storytelling. So I wonder whether there was something about, from what Garance has said about this concern with things as they are, you know the reality of that space, the relationship between that actually being able to then create a storyboard in a fictional setting which would have been the dramas that she was working with the director.

Liz:  Yeah that makes a lot of sense and I think that idea and that notion of places where you can sort of see the cracks being more narratable and lending themselves more to stories is certainly the case and was certainly my response to those images as well and I think what is interesting to compare with that is the way so often we encounter homes now. So the distinctiveness of the Location Finder photographs comes out almost by comparison with what our expectations are when we look at home interiors now. I think obviously we live in a culture where images are very, very pervasive and so the way images circulate in the media, especially social media now, we’re looking for certain visual cues and very often the way we encounter home interiors are as these very polished spaces, perhaps spaces that don’t invite kind of an imaginative leap in the same way, which is something I hadn’t really thought about before but have certainly been staged in a certain way.

So that idea of staging comes in, if we can think of that as kind of ordering things in a certain way. I suppose there’s different ways of reading the word staging as well. But in terms of kind of organising and ordering things for a certain kind of visual effect I think we see that in a lot of the images of home interiors and what’s quite striking about those kinds of images is the absence of kind of the human touch. and I suppose this is the way spaces are commercialised as well: people are invited to desire that kind of aesthetic or to desire living in that home through seeing a kind of blank canvas. And so perhaps they’re invited to then imagine and superimpose their own lives onto that, but there isn’t kind of the evidence of human habitation there to begin with. And I think that brings out quite a strong distinction between desiring home and actually inhabiting the space. So yeah I think that contrast is something that’s interesting to think about. And a very interesting contrast with how you might think about the space in Location Finder I suppose it’s not curated in that sense at all. So curation is a term that we could perhaps use beyond the frame of a gallery or a museum now but interesting the Location Finder collection is more of a kind of personal archive I suppose or it’s a professional archive for a specific kind of use which isn’t curated in its presentation. I suppose you spoke about that as well with Garance there’s also this question of documentation that comes in at some point as well I think with these images.

Documenting home lives

Ana: Yeah absolutely and I think that’s a really interesting point is to think of the status of this collection as one that had a specific function as you said so it was considered as a research tool that Garance would use together with the director to then ascertain if they would go and film in those locations. And indeed many of, or the majority I think of the locations that we have in the collection at MoDA were never used eventually for filming actually but the way that Garance would approach this task was that she wanted was to be as effective as possible. So then her assistant would then take the photographs really quickly to Supa Snaps or Boots or the chemist, or you know whichever nearby business that would have been able to process the images and initially in the 80s that would have taken a couple of days. Then afterwards as the technology improved it would just take a few hours.

So then someone would collect the images and they would go back to the office and then just sort them out by the address, put them in these folios with the tape which is still how they’ve reached MoDA, so that’s the current status of the collection, and then they would just write all the details, the address, the contact details. Importantly I think is that Garance always said to the people that she worked with and whose homes she documented that these images would never be made public and I think that’s an important point. If we think also that in a way how was public understood in that point, because they were then going into a professional context in which they were being viewed by some of Garance’s co-workers but I think that there was something here about maybe preserving still that level of privacy of these images and Garance as the custodian of that which I think what maybe suggests to me the way that this archive was perhaps more of a private archive even if it did have a professional function. And indeed it’s interesting that Garance around that time she undertook some studies in heritage. So she was also thinking about the value of this collection in terms of the lives of people that it was documenting and visually preserving and I think that is what informed the decision for her to want this repository of images to not be lost entirely. And I think what’s interesting, as you pointed out earlier is that then there was another shift that happens when this collection then enters the space of the museum and curation takes on a very different meaning.

Liz: Yeah definitely in the museum context there is an implicit link between, or an association with curation as kind of some kind of public activity so in the presentation of the images themselves that curating element, I was talking about it on kind of contemporary social media platforms wasn’t taking place. But also even, and it’s very interesting what you said about Garance also studying heritage sort of thinking about preserving the collection in some way but in line with that not necessarily perhaps so much thinking about how the public could engage with it but rather thinking that it needed to be preserved for posterity in a sense because it gave a snapshot of a particular period and the way people lived. And I suppose the contrast as well in the way people lived throughout that period, because there is a contrast in some of the types of locations that were photographed.

Ana: Absolutely and I think that came across very much in the way that Garance was thinking about, not just the collection but also her engagement with a variety of different people. And she describes, you know being in south west suburbia and what were very lavish household but then being in the areas where it was mostly social housing estates and getting to know the people there. And she also describes working with sex workers in Soho. And she used the words of being, feeling honoured about coming into contact with such a wide cross-section of society and therefore through the imaging of these spaces to translate I guess those different kinds of domesticity and ways of living in the collection and therefore wanting to preserve that as well. what I don’t know is how at one point Garance starts to think in this way, whether it’s in the process of creating this collection or once she’s actually finalised this and then decides to give it to the museum and then the status of this collection changes somehow.

Liz: Yeah, yeah definitely. You can see I suppose you can imagine the point at which it begins to resemble a collection that’s the moment in which someone’s mind turns towards thinking about it as such and perhaps thinking about it as something about having that kind of value and that social value. And then that I suppose is also why it’s made its way into MoDA because that is one of the museum’s remit is to be able to kind of document aspects of everyday and domestic life.

Ana: You’re listening to That Feels Like Home. I’m Ana Baeza and in this episode I’m talking to Liz Stainforth about images of home and everyday life. We’ve been discussing the Location Finder Collection at MoDA, and now we are going to move onto discussing how museums and social media circulate images of home, and how this complicates the separation of public and private.

Collecting home: museums and beyond

Liz: Going back to that question of home, I think the collection being in the museum now it does raise interesting questions it’s like home is coded as private, which is linked to this question that we’ve talked about around private information but at what point, but does that remain the case, you know is that the case in posterity? I think there is a tendency in museum collections to have quite a static conception of what they are but there is a sense in which these homes that were people’s homes at a moment in time that they may no longer be those places for whatever reason. It may be that the physical space itself no longer exists in that configuration. It may be that the people who lived in the spaces have moved out of them. So is there perhaps, and this is like a sort of question that perhaps it’s possible to kind of imminently answer but in the abstract is there a moment when museums with collections such as these have to reassess to a certain extent to say that those kinds of…the public and private associations that those places have no longer kind of persist in that way or, you know have changed somewhat or have been reconfigured somewhere along the line. And does that create room for more public engagement with them?

Ana: Yeah I think that’s a really interesting point because I think it also raises a more general question about how we consider home and homemaking in the first place, which is on the one hand this idea of something that’s kind of static. So there’s this image of privacy that we can’t kind of meddle with and make it public because there’s all that personal information. But that kind of negates to some extent the ways in which homes are continuously made and unmade and there’s kind of ways in which, it’s not just that those houses might not exist because people don’t live there anymore but the nature of that space might have been altered entirely as well because homes are a process of habitation that changes over time.

So I think it does raise a tension and an interesting set of questions for museums in thinking  about how they position themselves to what is in effect a continuously changing thing of making home. So I don’t think I have an answer to that, I think it’s something to continue thinking about and to, yeah I suppose is it about going back to these places? Is it about contacting the people? I’m not sure. I think it’s quite a kind of many faceted subject that needs more thought but it’s definitely an important one in terms of thinking about how heritage mobilises certain ideas around collections and that I think we shouldn’t be taking for granted that these places are unchangeable because they’re not, because that’s not what homes are really.

Liz: Yes and what it requires really is attention on the one hand to perhaps less static definitions of what collections are and what they might be and on the other also close attentiveness to the fact that home is very, is quite a conceptually vague category and demands quite an expansive definition. So I think consideration of both of those things has to kind of go into how you…what you do with a collection of this nature, which is what makes it so interesting in a way and really does make it quite distinct, as I was saying before I think the way we often encounter home today, especially through contemporary social media platforms that question of like this was…the collection was accumulated for commercial purposes but it’s not trying to sell an ideal of home in the same way that those images do.

And the image of the ideal home is it kind of a return to a former completeness which is of course quite illusory. But I do think ideal homes have something of that in them and that is really quite different from the Location Finder images which are  kind of I suppose trying to capture real life on some level as far as that’s possible. I don’t mean to say by talking about ideal homes in the context of social media platforms that this is a new thing either, I think there’s a lot of continuities through things like Ideal Home catalogues and other print media, you know the circulation of the ideal home via media is quite a longstanding trope which I think is something you’ve thought about a little bit and written about before as well.

‘Ideal’ homes in analogue and digital media

Ana: Yeah and I mean I think what’s interesting is that in the collection of MoDA we have the Location Finder photographs and then we have all this host of catalogues, brochures, magazines that are precisely showing the kinds of images of ideal homes that you were just referring to. So I think it’s important to acknowledge the historical existence of prior ideal representations of what homes should be, what domesticity should look like and often this has been coded in very middle class terms, often centred on the nuclear family. So you can think of the suburban expansion in the 1930s is really central I suppose to that but also responsible for the myth making that happens around homes in suburbia.

So I think there is something interesting here in terms of the normalisation of certain meanings of what home is and the Location Finder I think is interesting because it presents other ideas of what home could be and it kind of exists in dissonance with those dominant representations which we’ve seen in magazine culture but also in cinematic representations of home, especially from the 1940s into the 1950s that also retrench that idea of home life as family life. So I think you know it’s interesting to think about the collection in that context and then to link it to these more contemporary iterations of how ideal homes were constituted. And it was interesting for me also to, browsing again through current location companies that would be operating similarly to what Garance was doing that that seems to have changed quite a lot. So the kind of images that you will see in these platforms are again quite glossy images, kind of seamless representations of domestic space which are much more in line to the sort of polished imagery that you’re referring to in Instagram and Pinterest and I think reflecting on the changes of the profession of Location Finder itself is quite telling. So when Garance was working it wasn’t required that she had photographic skills, I mean she did happen to know a bit about photography because of private interest but it wasn’t a requirement, whereas now that would be one of the prerequisites when you are working for these location companies. So I think there is something there about this professionalised gaze if you like that is perhaps more the norm now when we see the ways that homes are pictured online and I know that’s something that you’ve also been thinking about Liz in terms of the professionalising of that gaze in social media.

Liz: Yeah again it’s like an extension of a longer tradition of kind of regulating ways of looking and ways of seeing I think and you can see what some people have characterised as a new aesthetic regime now with Instagram and sometimes Pinterest images as well. I was reading an article, about Pinterest and about how that was set up and it was quite interesting to see that initially it was very tightly managed by the company itself, that the pool of images was quite tightly managed, it wasn’t that people could just upload anything they wanted to Pinterest boards and initially perhaps they invited people who I suppose already had made their name through design or designing interiors or just people who were influencers already to a certain extent were invited to the platform to create Pinterest boards which then other people could utilise for their own.

So actually what you see on a platform like that is that the images that are circulating are quite restricted, it’s not just anything, so in that sense they are setting the aesthetic tone for what’s acceptable and at the same time I suppose cultivating you know what people expect to see and then to a certain extent what you would then seek or what would be framed as desirable when you encounter those images. So yeah I found that’s quite an interesting aspect of those platforms. They’re advertised as very participatory but in a sense there is still an element of control in terms of the aesthetic of what’s being put out there. And I suppose the other thing that is interesting is the way that advertising happens in some of these platforms now like you can see that something, it’s a bit more insidious so that perhaps somebody has an Instagram account and they sell, or in a sense promote their products via that account, like that’s quite a well-documented practice now, people make their living off doing that. But you don’t go on the account necessarily to buy products but as a result of looking at the images and perhaps seeing things that you like you’re able to link through to the purchase of the product as well. So I think like the nature of advertising on these platforms around ideal homes is a bit more insidious in this context.

Ana: Well yeah it makes me think what you’re saying about these glossy catalogues you know home is produced through the placement of  modern furniture in the 1930s as the home you should aspire to, that you should desire. So there is that saleability of the space. But I think what strikes me of what you’re saying is that we had say in the 1930s. 1940s, all these catalogues that are trying to attract a consumer and are advertising these particular products through the staging of home in a particular way but in what you’re describing it feels to me that the consumer and the producer are now almost one in the same or it’s harder to make that distinction and I think that does kind of suggest, what you were saying something more insidious that is happening here in the way that the staging of home and who’s doing that and in what way and for what purpose is happening at the moment.

Liz: Definitely.

Ana: So we’ve been talking about the Location finder collection and MoDA and images of home. But Liz and I also talked about a more recent initiative by the Museum of the Home, the Stay at Home project, which has been documenting home life during Covid.

Documenting home life during Covid

Ana: I think then there’s something also interesting in thinking about other projects that are trying to document home in different ways and this is happening in a non-corporate institutional context, so I’m thinking of a recent project that was launched by the Museum of the Home in London, this is called The Stay at Home Project, and the idea of this project was to document how home lives have changed over this period over the pandemic. So you can participate online. There’s a series of questions that they ask you to answer about your experiences of home. So those questions might be about how the pandemic has changed the way you use your home, how do you feel about your home? And then you can upload also up to five images of the home spaces. And browsing through the website it think it was interesting to see that they actually had a very spontaneous, unpolished feel to them so you would often see spaces that are not so carefully arranged, you might catch the back of one of the children who’s pictured in the photograph. Sometimes there’s a close-up. There’s not a coherence actually across all the images. There’s a great range. And it really does feel for me like it’s capturing some of the everyday life and kind of the pace and rhythm of activities and in how life has changed during this period and how domestic arrangements have also changed. So I think it’s interesting that, you know we’re talking about home and staging home and some of the people that take part in this project might also be potentially taking part in the kind of social media imaging of home. But it’s interesting to see that there are different visualising strategies when people are engaging in social media commercial sites and when they’re engaging in what’s perceived as a public, institutional context. And I think that this says something about the expectations placed on museums as spaces that have a role in the curation of these kind of images and of public life or the way that public life is talked about. So I don’t know if you have some thoughts on that but I think it’s quite an interesting distinction.

Liz: Yeah definitely. I think there’s a lot to unpack there. The first thing which was the last thing you were reflecting on about how people engage I suppose or are willing to share aspects of their home life when they’re doing it on a social media platform versus when they’re doing it for a museum project, that might be quite different. Also of course there is like that sense in which this project Staying at Home is trying to capture historical moments as well to a certain extent with the pandemic and to capture the impact that’s having on people’s lives due to having to stay at home through lockdown. But I do think it’s interesting how people might self-select and self- censor especially if they think, and they have the kind of advanced knowledge that this project is documenting something for posterity, the idea that it might have a life beyond their immediate lives and circumstances. So definitely I think that’s at play. And yeah the other interesting aspect is that it is quite a sensitive issue as well, it’s completely understandable why people, and it’s great that people want to take part in this project and are able to share aspects of their life but this just makes me think about as well those situations that people might find themselves in where they’re forced to share more of their life than they’re perhaps willing to. So that’s another thing that you can’t document exactly through a museum project but that is a facet of what’s happening under COVID.

And we definitely discussed this in the university teaching context  of specifically teaching online during COVID that if the successful delivery of online teaching requires a certain kind of engagement, requires people to have their videos on then that can actually be very exposing for people, aside from the problem of maybe not having a dedicated space or a stable internet connection the way exposing yourself in that moment to others, you know the way the home and effectively your backdrop exposes other things about your social situation, can be quite revealing of different class dimensions and disparities in a way that people are then forced into that position of I suppose inhabiting that space, which may feel very uncomfortable in what is supposed to be a kind of formal teaching context which is supposed to be kind of based on this kind of – and of course there’s difficulties there as well – but is based on the idea that you’re kind of in a neutral space together discussing things which as I say that’s problematic to start with but when you’re having to kind of phone in from home it adds this extra layer and is potentially exposing of these additional aspects and things that could give rise to additional anxieties.

Ana: I absolutely agree. I think there’s something here also to consider in terms of the self-selecting nature of these projects that have been seeking to document COVID and the ethics around how much can you ask of people to show when they might be in very vulnerable situations but as a result of that and because there might be the self-selection happening what are the stories that are actually being collected and being documented as a result of this which then has all sorts of implications for this Stay at Home project in particular to what extent can it capture the range of experiences of home. And we’ve already been talking and I might have said at the beginning of the podcast that there is obviously the question of home intersects with a whole set of issues that might involve displacement, migration, insecurity, and it’s to what extent can projects like this actually make space for that and should they and if so how do they. So I think there’s something here in terms of how institutions negotiate both wanting to record the historical moment in its greatest diversity but also how to do that in a way that’s ethically not extractive

Liz: Yeah it’s definitely something to think about for us not to take it as a given I think. I think it’s trying and then it is a conversation that needs to be had in order to be able to negotiate the ethics about. And definitely in the sense of like being able to document all of the uncertainty and all of the kind of inequality that’s perpetuated by COVID as well I think there needs to be way is of making that visible and not invisiblising [sic] that but I suppose it’s a question of what institutions, is the museum an institution that’s fit for purpose to do that work? And I wouldn’t answer the question one way or the other particularly but the question might be what would make it fit for purpose to do that work? So yeah I think that’s probably something that would be an interesting way forward.

Ana: On that thought Liz of how we might document the diversity of home experiences ethically thank you very much and it’s been great to have you in the podcast and to talk to you about all these things. Thank you.

Liz: Thank you for inviting me.

Ana: A huge thanks to my guest for this episode, Liz Stainforth, for joining us to talk about how homes are staged for the camera, about the professional and yet very personal Location Finder Collection. We’ve also touched on the challenges facing museums and heritage organisations undertaking projects to document everyday life at home, particularly now during the pandemic. And here at MoDA we will continue mulling over these questions, and researching the Location Finder collection. Due to privacy reasons, this collection is not in public view or searchable on our website at the moment.  But if you’d like to learn more about it, do get in touch by emailing moda@mdx.ac.uk. I’m Ana Baeza and this podcast is brought to you by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. For more information about this episode, shownotes and reading list please visit our website www.moda.mdx.ac.uk/. We’ll be back again, touching yet more aspects of home life and the everyday. Stay tuned.

Further Reading

Barbour, K. and Heise, L. 2019. Sharing #home on Instagram, Media International Australia.

Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. 2009. Software, Objects, and Home Space, Environment and Planning A, 41, pp. 1344-1365.

Edwards, E., 2012. Objects of affect: Photography beyond the image. Annual review of anthropology, 41, pp.221-234.

Edwards, E., 2011. Photographs: material form and dynamic archive. Deutscher Kunstverlag.

Edwards, E. 2005. Introduction in Brown, A.K. and Peers, L. eds., Museums and source communities: A Routledge reader. Routledge.

Gregory, R. Weird Solidarities, DIS Magazine: http://dismagazine.com/discussion/72958/karen-gregory-weird-solidarities/

Highmore, B., 2010. Ordinary lives: Studies in the everyday. Routledge.

Highmore, B. ed., 2002. The everyday life reader. Psychology Press.

Lui, D. 2015. Public Curation and Private Collection: The Production of Knowledge on Pinterest.com, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 32, issue 2, pp. 128-142.

Rose, G., 2000. Practising photography: an archive, a study, some photographs and a researcher. Journal of historical geography, 26(4), pp.555-571.

Serafinelli, E. 2017. Analysis of Photo Sharing and Visual Social Relationships: Instagram as a case study, photographies vol 10, issue 1

Wilkins, A., 2018. The ethics of collaboration with museums: Researching, archiving and displaying home and migration. Area, 50(3), pp.418-425.

Woods, H. S. 2018. Asking more of Siri and Alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35:4, pp. 334-349.

Zulli, D. 2018. Capitalizing on the look: insights into the glance, attention economy, and Instagram, Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol 35, issue 2

Stay at Home Project (Museum of the Home): https://www.museumofthehome.org.uk/explore/stay-home-collecting-project/

Show Notes

Credits

Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guest Elizabeth Stainforth

Editing by Zoë Hendon and Paul Ford Sound

Music Credits

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.