Linea Vestimentaria
Tuesday. Beautifully summery this morning, with a cool breeze… pretty much perfect weather for me. I have a day off as well, just to put the icing on the cake. Dropping Dash off at school was smooth; yesterday’s traffic seems to have abated for now. I got my daily photo first thing today… and I’m starting to realise I have a bit of an obsession with washing lines. Whether this will end in a project or in therapy, time will tell…
I did a little research with the help of Perplexity AI, as I’m sure I’m not the only photographer to find interesting compositions amongst the dangling socks and towels. This is what it came up with:
“Clotheslines have captured the imagination of photographers throughout history, sometimes becoming a powerful visual element in documentary photography. In the early 20th century, Walker Evans, one of America's most influential documentary photographers, recognised the visual poetry of laundry suspended between tenement buildings.
His photographs "Clothesline, New York City" (circa 1930) and "Clotheslines and Smokestacks" (1928-30) transformed these ordinary domestic scenes into compelling compositions that spoke to the human condition. Evans developed a straightforward documentary style that sought truth in photography through precise capture of stark facts, finding extraordinary meaning in ordinary American life.
The clothesline was an intrinsic component of the urban landscape, particularly in New York's tenement districts, where they formed complex networks between buildings. These lines of garments functioned as a visual census, revealing intimate details about household size, age, and social status. For tenement dwellers, who comprised two-thirds of New York City's population by 1900, clotheslines were a practical necessity in cramped living conditions.
The labour involved in laundry was considerable—water carried upstairs from street pumps, boiled on stoves, and clothes hung on pulley-powered lines that crisscrossed courtyards and alleys. Beyond their practical function, clotheslines served surprising additional purposes, including conveying messages, groceries, and even beer between apartments.
Berenice Abbott, another significant figure in American photography, documented clotheslines as part of her passionate mission to photograph New York's changing urban landscape. Her 1936 photograph "Court of the First Model Tenement in New York City" captures laundry hanging on lines strung between buildings, with children playing below—a poignant juxtaposition of domestic life against architectural space. Abbott's straightforward approach, influenced by French photographer Eugène Atget, allowed the personality of her subjects to dictate the form of her photographs.
Other notable photographers who incorporated clotheslines into their social documentary work include Helen Levitt, known for her candid street photography of New York neighbourhoods, and Jacob Riis, whose photographs exposed the harsh conditions of tenement life.
The clothesline in photography often transcends its mundane function to become a powerful symbol. Each diagonal line represents the intersection of lives and cultures within the vertical grid of urban architecture. The garments themselves allude to bodies not present, creating a ghostly human presence.
As writer Luc Sante observed, clotheslines characterised "a life stretched by necessity, out of interiors of apartments as far as possible into the public space beyond". Contemporary artists continue to find inspiration in this humble domestic feature. London-based artist Helga Stentzel creates whimsical "Clothing Line Animals" by arranging garments to resemble various creatures, demonstrating the enduring visual appeal of laundry on the line—a visual metaphor for community, intimacy, and the poetry of everyday life.”
