Alien domesticity: representing home during a pandemic

Abstract

Cultural geography and the related disciplines of urban sociology and anthropology have long focused their theoretical lenses on the city as a space of lived multiplicity. This photographic essay focuses its lens on the home as such a space. During the pandemic lockdown of 2020–2021, many of us spent more time in our homes than we ever had before, working, teaching, schooling, shopping, and barricading ourselves from the outside world. This essay borrows from the often ambiguous and anonymizing aesthetics of street photography to depict the multiple, overlapping worlds of home during a pandemic. Home, as depicted here, is an always unfinished process of affective assemblage and dissolution. The images featured seek to capture that lack of resolution, the messy emotional texture of home life under lockdown.

You can never go home again.

And you can never leave it again either.

That’s how I’ve been feeling this past year and a half, cooped up in my house in the Philadelphia suburbs during a Coronavirus pandemic that has only just begun to show signs of abating, and then, only tenuous ones, another variant always threatening to emerge. For now we remain ‘locked down’, ‘sheltered in place’, the same place we were sheltered some 18 months back. Home is not what it once was for us, though I can’t quite seem to remember what it was before, like a family album lost somewhere in the archives of iPhoto. And as we remain barricaded within it –remote learning, remote teaching, remote shopping, remote living – it keeps expanding its territory within our lives. Shelter. Safe haven. Office. Work space. Art space. Think space. Zoom gathering place. Laundromat. School. Restaurant. Gym. Dozens of worlds competing within.

Cultural geography and the related disciplines of urban studies and sociology have long focused their theoretical lenses on the city as a space of lived multiplicity (Harvey, 2012; Massey, 2005; Thrift, 2007; Zukin, 2011), of social worlds intertwining with other social worlds, forming a loose assemblage of communities and contradictions that never quite cohere into a clear picture (Cresswell, 2019). Anthropologists increasingly view nature as multiple in a similar way, incapable of being collapsed into a single universal reality (see, for example, Kohn, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, 2014). More recently, social theorists have begun to understand houses as multiple, subject to the same sorts of impermanence, the same sorts of contradictions, the same continuous flux of becoming. Ingold (2012: 34), for instance, describes houses as ‘living organisms’; ‘Building [them] is a process that is continually going on, for as long as people dwell in an environment’ (p. 32). Biehl and Neiburg (2021: 540–541), similarly use the active term ‘house-ing’ instead of the static ‘house’ ‘to elicit the house as a dynamic – always relational – human–nonhuman entity modulated by tensions between stability and instability, borders and fluxes, stillness and movement’ (540–541). House-ing is always unfinished, always tentative, always on the verge of collapsing or becoming something else.

Houses, after all, are physical structures, subject to material constraints, wear and tear, remodelling and demolition. As such, they are not exactly the same thing as ‘homes’.

Whereas the house is generally perceived to be a physical built dwelling for people in a fixed location, the home, although it may possess the material characteristics of a built dwelling, implies a space, a feeling, an idea, not necessarily located in a fixed space.

(Briganti and Mezei, 2012: 5)

Home, claims philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1969), is a manifestation of our collective imaginings, our culture’s conception of family life forged into lived reality. Houses become homes under the continuous strain of our imagination. There is, in ordinary times, a relative stability to how contemporary Western societies imagine home. Home is where the heart is. Home is always on our minds. Home is the happy hearth that houses the family. These are decidedly bourgeois notions, no doubt, privileged notions of the comfortable, white and middle class. They are not necessarily shared by those suffering from domestic abuse, or who have to hide who they are from their parents or relatives. Nor are they necessarily shared by those who live in poverty, in violent neighbourhoods or warzones, or disenfranchised communities of color, whose domiciles are patrolled by predatory police forces. They are not even an accurate depiction of the lived complexities of those who subscribe to these conceptions of home. Home is always more than we ascribe to it. It is a place of safety, and a space of imprisonment (Soth and Cabrera, 2020), a refuge of comfort and a warzone where longstanding family conflicts play out. But these simplified imaginations of home endure nonetheless, continuously promoted in literature, media and the aspirational speeches of politicians. They do real work in establishing the reference points and comparisons through which we evaluate our own home lives. Our concepts of home seem to survive whatever real-world contradictions get thrown their way.

At least they did until COVID-19. Now, it is not so clear. The pandemic has made evident the deep ambivalences and ambiguities that animate domestic life (see Gómez Cruz, 2020b; Pixley, 2021). So, the question remains: how do we think about home now, when many of us are spending more time at home than ever before, when home keeps expanding its domain, its territory, its conceptual hold on us? How do we think about home when home is the place where nearly everything that happens to a person – good or bad – happens? Home, they say, is our shelter from the storm, but what if it is also the storm itself?

This photo essay was composed out of a simple idea: turning the theoretical lens that animates urban theory, anthropology and cultural geography onto domestic space during the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘My home’, writes cultural geographer Tim Cresswell, ‘is a discrete thing – an assemblage – comprising relations between parts and the kinds of things we do with those parts’ (Cresswell, 2019: 174). This essay seeks to illuminate that assemblage as it assembles and reassembles at a moment of profound instability and unease. To do so, I borrow from a visual tradition I have spent the last few years of my life learning, one that shares many of the conceptual ambitions of the aforementioned bodies of theory: street photography.

Street photography, as I have written about elsewhere (Luvaas, 2017, 2021), is an evolving photographic tradition devoted to candid documentation of life in public space (Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, 1994; see also Gómez Cruz, 2020a). Contemporary street photographers like Alex Webb, Carolyn Drake, Vineet Vohra and Ximena Echague seek to capture the lived complexity of everyday life, the accidental poetry of momentary encounter and the multiple overlapping worlds that compose and constitute a place. Their work plays with opacity and ambiguity (see Glissant, 1997), the illegibility of so much of what happens around us. Their goal is to leave their images open-ended, capable of multiple interpretations. From such mentors as Maciej Dakowicz, Gus Powell and Joseph Michael Lopez, I have learned to use my photography as a way to depict without explaining and to represent without reducing. That is what I am attempting to do here, only within the realm of private domestic space.

My relationship with my subjects is different, of course, than with my other street photographic work. It is more intimate, more embedded, but my mode of seeing is similar, a kind of engaged alienation that makes no effort to distill the complexity of lived experience down to convenient theories, categories, or explanations. My intention here is to leave my images as open as possible, minimizing context and allowing viewers to make of the image what they will. I have decided, then, as has become conventional in street photography, to title these images only with the place (in this case, within the house) where they were shot and the rough date in which they were taken. Some of these images (like Figure 4, where my partner makes masks on our dining room floor, or Figure 9, where my daughter attends school in the same space where my partner works), could only have been shot during the pandemic. Others, like Figures 2 and 5, depict events that happened before, and will likely happen when the pandemic ends. And yet, the pandemic informs my eye in each of these shots, reframing even ordinary domestic activities in the affective texture of this moment. Imagination intervenes, both in my act of framing the shot, and in your process of reading it (Mjaaland, 2017; Smith 2013).

Living room, Spring 2020.

The stairs and living room, Spring 2020.

Living room, Summer 2020

Child’s bedroom, Summer 2020.

So many of the images we encounter in the social sciences are subjected to the disciplinary framing of words (see Berger, 1982: 89). They serve as illustrations of, or addendums to, ideas presented in the text (Taylor, 1996). The photos in this essay are intended to speak for themselves. But that doesn’t mean they have anything specific to say. Photographs don’t always have a message. They don’t necessarily ‘mean’ anything. Instead, they evoke. They trigger feeling (see Figures 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13). They operate in the pre-articulate realm of affect (see Massumi, 2002; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010; Stewart, 2007). To maintain this orientation towards affect over meaning, I have reproduced these images in black and white. In black and white, the errant details, with their potential symbolic value, become less pronounced than the overall mood of the image, the emotional texture of the scene depicted. The black and white also places these images into conversation with the classic street photographic work of photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and Josef Koudelka.

Backyard, Winter 2020.

Backyard, Summer 2020.

My goal in doing this photo essay was to use the techniques I learned in street photography in order to view my home as if I were an outside observer looking in or a stranger passing by. Sometimes, this perspective is literal. Some of these images are shot through windows or doorways, over fences or shoulders. The figures depicted are rendered anonymous, even, at times, unknowable. Through positioning myself as an outsider to my own life, I hope to capture something of my home’s lived multiplicity, the overlapping acts of becoming that make, remake and unmake this space. My partner and my daughter are the most common subjects depicted here, as they are two of the most significant agents in making our home what it is. But they are not the only ones. So are our neighbors (Figure 1), so often crossing the invisible boundary that separates our property from theirs. So is our kitten (Figure 6), a pandemic rescue we have burdened with easing our isolation during lockdown. So is that woodpecker that drives its beak into the side of our house, carving out a hole in the shingles about the size of my fist. So is the Fujifilm camera that sits idle on our coffee table waiting (impatiently, I imagine) for me to engage it.

Neighbor’s backyard, Summer 2020.

Kitchen, Winter 2021.

Home is not a thing; it is a process (Biehl and Neiburg, 2021). I hope these images do some justice to what that process feels like in pandemic times. I hope these images capture something of the affective landscape (Low, 2017) of home, what Böhme (2017) would call its ‘atmosphere’. Never has our home felt more familiar to us, more intimate, more protective. And never has it felt more peculiar, more permeable with outside presences, more expansive in scope, depth and weight. I want these images to capture that lack of resolution, the messy emotional texture of this alien domesticity.

Sun porch, Spring 2020.

Front yard, spring 2020.

Backyard, Spring 2020.

Child’s bedroom, Fall 2020.

Front door, Fall 2020.

Biographical Note

BRENT LUVAAS is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Drexel University, Philadelphia. A visual anthropologist, his work explores how digital technologies shape the way we see and experience the world around us. He is the author of Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging (Bloomsbury, 2016) and DIY Style: Fashion, Music, and Global Digital Cultures (Berg, 2012). His book Street Style was the 2019 winner of the John Collier Jr. Award for Still Photography.

Address: Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.

email: luvaas@drexel.edu