AUTOPSIES RESEARCH GROUP

Guest blog by Edwina Attlee

In the 1980s there were over twelve thousand launderettes in the UK, today there are less than three thousand. As part of my research into homes away from home in the city I am looking at these seemingly obsolete spaces and asking questions about our experience of using them. In a world where the emptying out of our insides (on social networking platforms such as Facebook or Twitter) seems to be perfectly acceptable behaviour, it is worth looking at one of the first places in which we washed our dirty linen in public.

The launderette (and by extension, the spaces crossed by washing-lines) exemplify the mixing of private and public and inside with outside. When we make a trip to the launderette, we engage in a process of carrying-out, from the home to the public space, the most intimate and bodily items that city-dwellers own. These worn, dirty, and personal fabrics travel outside the house to be cleaned; they cross the boundary between privacy and exposure.

In spite of being a space of possible exposure, the experience of using a launderette is often pleasurable; it is a cosy-exposure. Launderettes are warm, soapy, humming spaces where you are often left alone for an hour or two with just the machines and the spinning clothes to keep you company. They are technical spaces, and spaces of necessity, but they also occupy a space like Pierre Mayol’s neighbourhood, a space that is neither entirely public nor completely domestic. The launderette is a space of waiting; of idling, daydreaming and thinking. It is a space of space. Mayol writes that the home and neighbourhood “are the only places where in different ways one can do what one wants.”

There are other spaces in the city which combine the functionality and irrationality of the home. The launderette is an irrational space because it elongates and subverts the space-time relationship normally at work in the city – this is the relationship characterised by the commute to work; the crossing of the farthest distance in the smallest amount of time. As such this home away from home may also function as a space of absence, a space for daydreaming. Michel de Certeau writes: “I read and I daydream, my reading is thus an impertinent absence.” In the everyday reading of the city the launderette allows for a kind of delinquency. 

Edwina Attlee


References

Pierre Mayol, ‘The Neighbourhood’, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol.2. Living and Cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p.11.

Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) p.173.

Our fridge is covered with a curious collection of reject passport photos. Some of the sitters have their eyes closed as they blinked with the flash, others are frowning, and some of the photos are overexposed or the image is washed out. Although at the time the subjects probably winced at the pictures, I never tire of looking at them as I open the fridge door. None of the photos are more than ten or fifteen years old yet they look so different to the passport photos today. Some are printed in richly coloured hues, others in a lush, velvety black and white.

Old photo booths took four photographs in succession, and each was exposed in sequence onto a strip of photographic paper. During the last decade almost all automatic photo booths have been replaced with digital successors, coinciding with new stricter regulations of passport photo standards. These machines usually have a computer screen allowing you to view the identity photograph taken, and have the choice to reject or accept it. On completion of the sitting, a single photo is reproduced three or four times, or sometimes four photos are taken at the same time by four lenses, resulting in minute differences in the final product.

If the technology of the digital machines differs from the traditional designs so has the experience of having your photo taken in a new booth. These brightly lit cases with automated voices piping out instructions are so impersonal and daunting that it is hardly surprising that the resulting pictures are as hideous as they are dismally pale in colour. Gone is the choice of coloured curtain from the old machines (blue, brown, orange), the disconcerting reflective pane of the camera, and the blinding flashbulb. While new machines quickly produce an often poor image with a quality rarely being better than a domestic ink-jet printer, the old booths churned out shimmering strips still damp from the processing chemicals.

The hit-and-miss character of the old photo booths seems to be well and truly a thing of the past, as is the joy of being able to deliberately mess up a couple of the four photos with a silly face, or a special message to a loved one. In the world of digital photography, mistakes, mess and unpredictability no longer just happen but have to be meticulously planned.

In response to a yearning for the old machines, and the warmth of a grainy image, a few restored 'analogue' booths have made a comeback in a number of European countries, in trendy arts venues, theatres and cafes. In Paris, three machines are in use in Palais de Tokyo, Espace Ephemère, and Le Centquatre, where Photomaton devotees can have their fix, and a new generation can discover the lost marvel that was once found in every train station.

Digital photo machines are now trying to put the fun back in back in the booths, offering sitters the chance to superimpose their face next to an image of the current favourite pop star or actor. But nothing can compensate for the loss of the creative possibilities of the four flashes of old passport photos, and the richness of quality and depth of the image.

Here is a link to a company that restores and hires old-style photo booths in France: http://www.lajoyeusedephotographie.com

Jacob Paskins