Domestic details in the photographic artist’s book

This article considers the juncture of the book form with photography as a place for looking closely at domestic detail. Anna Fox’s book works My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (2000) and Cockroach Diary (2000) concentrate upon domestic habitats and the people and objects that move through them. Fox’s concern with documenting her own family’s lived-in spaces and domestic rituals in My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words and Cockroach Diary is accompanied by an attention to the works’ scale and to how a photographic project designed as a book asks us to look differently at objects, practices and behaviours in the domestic realm. These two small books train our gaze on the overlooked and provide an opportunity to consider the relationship between domestic interiority, autobiography and detail in photography.