Project Rationale - final

The association of kitchen sinks and drama emerges from the British Social Realist movement which thrived in the 1950s and 60s. This movement spotlighted working class culture, even glamorised it. The legacy of plays like “Look Back in Anger”, films such as “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and iconic documentaries like “Cathy come Home” can be detected today in our favourite “soaps”. Such cultural products, set in the ordinary domestic environment, explore the compelling moral issues of the day and in so doing, catalogue the changing nature of society.

I had hoped that my kitchen photographs would evoke some of this drama through capturing an environment busy with tell-tale evidence about the people who lived there and how they ran their lives. What I discovered when I neared the end of my shooting schedule was that very few of the kitchens I had photographed did convey this ongoing drama of people’s daily lives. The kitchens were very much under control and not giving much away. My first inclination was to go in search of more kitchens that fitted the original concept, but encouraged by my tutors, I looked again at the documentary evidence I had produced and thought about what it had to say about contemporary living.

The ten photographs here are of kitchen sinks which are all contained in the same terraced row in Padiham (photograph below). One of them is my own sink - nearly all of them are very tidy. The order and control of the environment is in stark contrast to the chaotic “workshop” of the kitchens featured in kitchen sink dramas from post war up until the 1970s. Somewhere along the way, the function of the kitchen has been hidden away as home owners, perhaps inspired by makeover TV shows and glossy magazines, have become increasingly conscious of style and form.
Further, these photographs might be seen as evidence of a cultural shift that is manifest not only at a domestic level, but also nationally. Just as we have stopped making things in the kitchen, Britain has ceased to be a great manufacturing nation and much of our industry is clean and conceptual. So too our kitchens have veered towards the conceptual - an upmarket kitchen website spells out the core ethos behind its products; modern purism:

“a powerful, poetic dialogue between presentation and concealment” (www.poggenpohl.de)

This sounds more like a dubious moral code than a selling point for a kitchen. What is being concealed and what presented I wonder? I’m not suggesting that the kitchens featured in this exhibition haven’t seen the dramas and tensions of preparing the occasional ‘Sunday roast’ for the in-laws, but there is evidence of these kitchens being less a “workshop” and more of a lifestyle indicator.

There is the underlying feeling in these photographs that presentation is at least as important as production.