California 1976-1977

The head of a female worker is seen peering over an office cubical at the Standard Oil Company of California. This and the other images are from Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work (2022) by Robert Slifkin, published by Mack

Self-portrait seated at a table circa 1971

For a brief moment in the late 1970s, Hare seemed poised to enter the pantheon of great photographers. His particular genius for investing his ostensibly ‘straight’ documentary pictures with an emotional power and visual complexity aligned his work alongside that of canonical figures such as Eugène Atget, Walker Evans and Lewis Hine – as well as contemporaries such as Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand

Playland at the Beach, San Francisco circa 1968-71

Hare’s photographs were taken at the height of the US’s involvement in the Vietnam war (registered in the numerous portraits of young soldiers that appear on the walls and tables of the homes Hare documented) and at the moment when the liberal dream of the 60s seemed gravely endangered by the election of Richard Nixon as president in 1968 – and given a knockout punch by his reelection in 1972

Richmond, California 1968-71

His photos seem to encapsulate a certain collective memory of the 1970s as a period of societal malaise and political doldrums, famously expressed in President Jimmy Carter’s assessment of a ‘crisis of confidence’ that plagued the nation at the end of the decade

Steubenville, Ohio 1971

At the same time, the countless stains and patched walls captured by Hare’s unforgiving camera, as well as the power cords that jarringly protrude from all sorts of objects, betray the subjects’ miscarried attempts at bourgeois decorum

West Chester, Pennsylvania 1972

In one of Hare’s most striking pictures, the man’s professional role bleeds into his domestic life. An unusually long cord stretches across the room, dividing the space and cordoning off its nine human occupants into one corner of the room. It’s as if the cords and wires coming out of the holes all over the lounge symbolise the social levelling brought about by mass cultural affluence, revealing that ‘at our most individual we appear as but slightly different consumers’

California 1968-1971

The kitsch paintings and curios that clutter Hare’s photographs, the lace doilies that protect the indecorous melange of modern and traditional furniture, the ormolu clocks and candlesticks, the imposing appliances and the gaudy labels of the cans and cartons of groceries that compose readymade still lives on the tables and countertops of these spaces … all these visual details register the crude and dulling wake of the postwar economic boom which allowed increasing numbers of Americans to become mass consumers

Gertrude Hare standing in the kitchen, Kensington, California 1968

Hare met Gertrude in 1953 when he was an undergraduate at Columbia and she was a 15-year-old Austrian émigré working as a waitress near campus. Gertrude’s desolate expression speaks to the troubled relationship that Hare recounts in the introduction to Interior America: ‘We seldom spoke to one another. Even our most intimate moments were less than satisfactory compromises between her instinctive opposition to birth control and my reluctance to have a child’

Self-portrait in my apartment, Ohio 1980

Perhaps the most overt declaration of Hare’s aesthetic was his selection of the Bancroft Library at the University of California – and notably not the Berkeley Art Museum – as the repository for his archive

Steubenville, Ohio 1971

According to Hare, it was the very act of photographing people in their domestic interiors that initially revealed to him the underlying oppressive social conditions that he would go on to explore more fully, first in his second, self-published book, This Was Corporate America, and later in his work as a therapist

Releasing My Father 1979

The day before his father’s death, this self- portrait shows Hare grimacing in an expression of extreme emotion that could suggest either pain or joy. Taken at Nicholl Knob, his favoured ‘power spot’ overlooking the San Francisco Bay, it was selected from the ‘three delayed exposures’ he made because of its ‘incredibly perfect alignment with my finger tips right on the horizon’. The alignment of the image was even more a matter of time than of space, prophetically, according to Hare, synchronising his life to his father’s.

Ohio 1979

‘All of us’ eating ice cream around Orville’s kitchen table