Too Many Products Too Much Pressure
COMING AUGUST 2025
“You gotta love it”, says 65-year-old Bill Delaney, beauty salesman in the greater Los Angeles area. Yes, you gotta love it. You gotta love the hustle, the getting-up-and-going-out, the repeating sales pitches, the flirting and the haggling; the unending calls, all week, Monday to Sunday, all day, morning till night. You gotta love the dance, the rush, and the territory.
In 1980, as a young photographer just beginning her MFA in San Francisco and developing a keen interest in documenting labor, Janet Delaney embarked for a week on the job with her soon-to-retire father. The days are long and exhausting, but there is, in the incessant driving, carrying and chatting, a restless, pulsing energy streaming from Delaney’s photographs. Picturing the beauty parlors with a critical distance (she did, after all, grow up in a time of questioning constricted gender roles and capitalist consumer culture), using frontal, wide shots and often harsh flash, Delaney created a witty documentation of a day in the life of a salesman. Despite the photo-novella humor, Delaney came to see her father’s work under new light. All the tough business dealings, all the missed dinners and the Saturday meetings became a testament to his efforts to provide for his children what he himself had not received. The story, ultimately, became a testament to his love.
Yes, you gotta love it—as it is a true labor of love.
Janet Delaney is an American photographer known for her poignant documentation of the intersection of work, home, and shifting cityscapes. Supported by research and interviews, her projects reflect a deep engagement with the passage of time and photography’s role as a historical record. Delaney gained recognition for her South of Market series, chronicling 1980s San Francisco gentrification. Her later projects, Public Matters and Red Eye to New York, captured civic life and street scenes in San Francisco and New York during the 1980s.
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Delaney has received three NEA grants and held a one year San Francisco Arts Commission residency. Her work is in major collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young, and the High Museum and the Museum of Fine Art Houston. She earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and held a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley.
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