I took photos of laundry for over 10 years heres what I learned
Transcriber: Nam Nguyễn
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
As a kid, my favorite game to play
at my grandma’s house
was to hang on her laundry lines.
Her laundry lines were not the kind
that are outside the balcony,
but they are on the inside and up.
So I used to put my hands up,
hang on these lines,
and think of myself as a bird, as a plane,
as something that’s free and flying.
Here, a lot of questions
started formulating in my head
about why do we do laundry,
what is laundry,
why does it have systems,
and most of all, why does it
always smells so good.
These questions traveled
with me as I was growing up,
and they transferred
in a way into my photography.
I bought my first camera as I was 16,
and I started taking pictures of laundry
inside my own apartment.
There, I learned from my own
mother and grandmother
that there are systems to do laundry.
You can either color code it,
that goes from different
gradients of colors,
or you can put it based on size -
big to small or small to big,
and never ever wash
colored laundry with white ones.
So I took my observation
a bit outside the apartment.
I started observing our neighbors.
In Aleppo, the buildings
are this close to each other,
so you could literally see whatever
is going on in your neighbors’ apartment:
how they fight, when do they eat,
when do they study,
and how basically they live their life.
And my neighbors
were very messy and all of that,
and that was very apparent
through their laundry.
So here, laundry started to become
a means for me to understand people
around me through their laundry.
I moved from Aleppo to Yerevan
a couple of years after that,
and there I was feeling
unsafe in a new city.
I was unfamiliar with my environment,
so I decided to familiarize
myself with it.
I took my camera,
I went out in the street,
and I started taking photos,
and there was a lot of laundry everywhere.
I started paying closer attention
to Yerevan’s laundry,
and as I was familiarizing myself
with the other issues as well,
there was always the discussion
about gender and taboos
and sexism in Yerevan,
but that was not present in their laundry,
because as I was walking
in one of the oldest
neighborhoods of Yerevan Kond,
I saw bras hanging, thongs,
and other kinds of underwear.
My grandma always told me
that you never put your underwear
outside for everybody to see,
but in Yerevan,
that was a whole other story.
So here the contradiction
between laundry and taboos became one.
A couple of years after that,
I took my observation one cycle further.
It went global.
I visited Italy and specifically
the city of Naples.
Naples is very famous
for its narrow streets,
just like my hometown, Aleppo.
As I was walking in the streets,
there was a lot of laundry everywhere,
and there were small shops in the street,
and laundry powder smell
was coming out of them.
My combined senses
of smell and vision were combined,
and they created this reconstructed
memory of a hometown
that I hadn’t visited for over five years,
and I was completely in another location,
and that was only because Italy
and Syria had a lot in common
through religious pilgrimages
that took place over centuries,
and these brought with them
a lot of food cultures,
how people do laundry,
so it was very obvious
that I would feel that in there.
I felt that same in southern France
a couple of years later,
and you could guess why
and what was the reason that I felt that.
But in France, the reason
behind it was different.
It was postcolonialism
because Syria was under the French mandate
for over 20 years in the 20th century.
So that didn’t only leave
a lot of social, cultural, educational,
and political effects on the country,
but it also affected the small things
like food and laundry
and how people live their lives.
From postcolonialism,
I moved back into war
because in 2016,
there was a four-day war
in Nagorno Karabakh.
I’d never heard of the place before,
so a year later
when it became relatively safer,
I decided to pay a visit.
Our tour guide was showing us
what happened there during the war,
how buildings were damaged,
and there was this one specific building
which was hurt the most.
It was right in front of the
Ghazanchetsots cathedral.
I looked at the building.
It was so ugly, dirty,
full of sorrow, pain,
but one thing stood out -
there was laundry out
on one of the balconies,
and it was beautifully and perfectly put,
just like my grandma says,
from small to big and it was all white,
and that laundry made me fade away
from everything the guide was saying,
and it was screaming
one word only: “Survival.”
A few years after that, I visited Lebanon.
Lebanon, for me, is a place
where I was always festive, happy,
it has amazing food,
but I’d never been
to this part of Lebanon before.
It was the Sabra and Shatila
Palestinian refugee camp.
This refugee camp,
I’d heard a lot of before,
specifically through a lot
of poets and writers.
It immediately took me
to my favorite poem by my favorite poet,
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish,
and he recites,
“My homeland is a clothesline
full of handkerchiefs
of blood shed every minute.”
At that moment, I stood
at one of the courtyards in the camp,
and it was full of laundry,
every color of laundry you could imagine,
and then again, I thought to myself
that these people wrote
about this laundry before,
but to me it was representing
the resilience of Palestinian people
after years of war,
deportation, and relocation
into many cities and refugee camps.
Eventually, I came to this realization
that laundry is a means of communication,
whether it’s through neighbors
or through its lines.
I saw people talking
to each other over laundry,
neighbors sharing coffee from balconies
as they put their laundry to dry.
I saw neighbors exchanging small pieces
of chocolate as they had a conversation.
So laundry, for a lot
of women specifically,
was turned into this social event.
I reconnected with my
ancestors through laundry
because I was at a scouts camp
in Switzerland,
where it’s a first world country,
and you could never
imagine yourself doing this,
but guess what?
I only had a bar of soap and a river,
and I had to do laundry
the old-fashioned way,
using my hands just like my ancestors did.
And there only I was very, very thankful
that we have washing machines today.
Laundry lines represent
a line of communication,
but they also can help you dry
anything that passes your mind.
It can be a dried fruit,
it can be a bag that you wash to reuse
to save the environment,
or during the times of crisis
when COVID hit,
a lot of people were washing their masks
and they were putting them out
on laundry lines.
In life, we usually look
for the big things to make sense
and to understand our surroundings
and what’s happening around us,
but sometimes small things like laundry
can show us a lot about who people are,
who this specific culture is,
and how do they do certain things.
To me and to everyone,
laundry is like music.
It’s a universal language.
It has its own rules and adjustments
from one culture to another,
from one family to another,
but at the end of the day,
we all have to do it to survive.
Thank you.