Call for Book Chapter
Can photography become a means of homemaking? If so, how does this representational medium deal with home as something that is not necessarily limited to the photographic frame. While for the photographer home is the space at which the camera aims, for the photographed subject it may be an ineffable and inexplicable feeling of being in space. Ubiquitous as it is, the concept of home evades simple definitions (Blunt & Dowling 2006). While it can denote ontological security, it can also host traumatic entrapments. Not always limited to a fixed locale, home signifies one’s relationship to oneself, as one tries to feel rooted in a transient world. While it can be seen as a material structure, a refuge from the outside world, a place to own (Despers 1991), it can also be perceived as a “socio-spatial” system (Saunders and Williams 1988), a “psycho-spatial” feature (Giuliani 1991), or a “warehouse of emotions'' (Gurney 2000). Whereas home can be a means of sustaining one’s identity (Porteous 1976), it can also become a site of domestic violence (Freeman 1979; Meth 2003). For some, home is merely a “domestic dwelling” in which people live (Atkinson & Jacobs 2016), for others, it is a place of “alienation” (Bartram 2016), porosity (Baxter and Brickell 2014), or a failed promise of protection (Dowling 2006). Home can be seen as an ongoing “performance of home” (Richardson 2019), or simply as a “feeling” internalized within us (Ravetz & Turkington 2011). By pivoting around the concept of home and via the medium of photography, our book inquires: how can photography represent the lived, perceived, and conceived experiences of homemaking? In other words, our book wants to explore the different ways through which the medium of photography defines the term oikos.
For the Ancient Greeks, society was divided into the spheres of oikos and polis and governed by oikonomia (the art of the household) and politikê technê (the art of politics). Broadly speaking, the term oikos was equivalent to “house” and “household”, deemed as familial, agricultural, or artisanal units of production (Giannouri 2014). Oikos, however, was not only the materialized and perceptible home, but also the immaterialized and imperceptible relations among human bodies and other nonhuman elements. It was a built shelter, an assemblage of emotions, moralities, and affects, as well as a meeting point within neighbourhoods and communities (Biehl & Neiburg 2021). In other words, oikos was home seen as a merging nexus between private and public life, family and politics, individuals and the state, thus binding the macrocosm of the universe to the microcosm of human beings. Consequently, oikos is not only a materialized domiciliary but also a space: of intimacy (Bachelard 1964), domesticity (Tuan 1974 & 1977), affect (Ingold 2011), nostalgia (Casey 1998), and self-identity (Heidegger 1971). Oikos is a spatial idea, whether such a space is externalized as a dwelling or internalized as a feeling.
Such an understanding of home, as a space that shapes the core of our existence, has already been put into practice and critically reflected on by several contemporary photographers. For example, Jacob Burge’s photo series Inside presents home as an imaginative space through photocollages in which people can ‘hide’ themselves in private interiors, thus questioning the supposed comfort associated with inhabitation and domiciliation (https://jacobburgephotography.com/inside). Marie Tamanova’s photobook It Was Once My Universe frames homecoming as returning to a place one no longer belongs, thereby presenting vagabondage and nomadism as alternatives to localized homemaking. (https://marietomanova.com/It-Was-Once-My-Universe). By focusing on displacement and dislocation in refugee camps, Angelos Tzortzinis has shown how daily chores become means of human and social adaptability in times of crisis (https://www.angelos-tzortzinis.com/#/project/13/Adaptability). By photographing the objects owned by several homeless people around California, Huang Qingjun’s photo series Homeless People’s Family Stuff shows how one’s possessions can become one’s home in the absence of a household (http://huangqingjun.com/cg/homeless-peoples-family-stuff/). Such examples show that, on the one hand, photographic representations can dwell on the materialized home captured within the frame; and on the other, they can reflect on the ongoing process of inhabitation, which is not necessarily confinable to the representational space of the photograph.