Janet Delaney : Too Many Products Too Much Pressure : Deadbeat Club

Janet Delaney : Too Many Products Too Much Pressure : Deadbeat Club by Tracy L. ChandlerOctober 19, 2025

Janet Delaney’s latest book, Too Many Products Too Much Pressure (Deadbeat Club, 2025), returns to a body of work she made in 1980, when she spent a week riding alongside her father on his sales route to beauty shops across Los Angeles. What began as a daughter photographing her father just weeks before his retirement has become, decades later, a layered meditation on labor, gender, family, and the changing nature of commerce. Through photographs, dialogue, vintage advertisements, and essays—including one by her mother—Too Many Products Too Much Pressure is a reminder that photography can hold multiple truths at once: love and critique, intimacy and distance, the personal and the historical. In revisiting this work, she not only reintroduces us to her father’s world but also invites us to consider our own.

I’ve been a longtime admirer of Janet Delaney’s ability to intertwine the personal with the political, to make work that is as much about relationships and memory as it is about place and history. From her South of Market series chronicling 1980s San Francisco to her street photographs in Public Matters, her images hold the weight of lived experience while opening a window into broader social and economic realities. With this latest project, Delaney brings that same depth and nuance to a more intimate subject, one rooted in family yet resonant far beyond it and I was excited for the chance to speak with her about how revisiting such personal material after more than four decades has deepened its meaning.

The following is a conversation between Tracy L Chandler and Janet Delaney.

TLC: This work was made in 1980 as you tagged along on your father’s sales trips to beauty shops around Los Angeles. I am interested in what inspired you to photograph and record these outings then and what inspired you to revisit this work now. Do you feel a change in the cultural and/or personal relevance of this work?

JD: I had studied visual anthropology with John Collier as an undergraduate. The idea of close observation of daily life fascinated me. I had just started the grad program at San Francisco Art Institute when a fellow student, Connie Hatch, made a two projector slide show with sound about her brother who was a lineman in the suburbs of Fort Worth. This format inspired me to do this project on my dad which was a mix of cool observation of the business of beauty and an intimate tale of my father and his work. When I added to this my compulsion to focus on the nexus of change, those delicate moments when one thing is being transformed into another, going home to photograph my father just weeks before he retired felt like a great opportunity to use this personal story to talk about much larger issues of work, beauty, family and the way corporations were encroaching into our daily lives.

Why publish this project now? The way we work and shop is in flux. People no longer come into the office, they Zoom in. Sales happen through websites with no personal interface. The idea of trust built up over decades of knowing the people you do business with, well, that is no longer valued. I miss the guys at the camera store that offered advice along with film and paper. When I did this project in March of 1980 I knew that the kind of job my dad did was disappearing. In the 1970s buying direct from big box stores was already crowding out the personal sales service that defined his work.

Now more than forty years later the repercussions of all of this tech-enhanced life are finally being fully felt. Online sales are easy and cheap, delivery is miraculously fast while streets are lined with empty store fronts. We know what the environmental and emotional cost is for these conveniences. By looking back at how things were we can more clearly see why we are where we are. This was my first serious project and it is the seed of the ideas I am still working on in my current practice with my project on how the tech industry has impacted the life and work of people in San Francisco.

TLC: Yes! This work is all so layered–these profound changes in culture and commerce wrap around this very personal change at its center core. There is something bittersweet about a career coming to an end and something disquieting about a transition into the next phase of life as the future is inherently unknowable.

There’s so much tenderness and complexity in the way you portray your father—he’s charismatic and funny, but there’s also this undercurrent of exhaustion, even melancholy. I’m curious how it felt to witness him in that space, not just as a daughter but as a photographer. Did the camera allow you to see him differently? Or did it create a kind of distance that made it easier to take it all in and see the social parallels?

JD: I spent a week in the front seat of Dad’s Plymouth Valiant as he navigated the LA Freeway system with comfortable familiarity. He was in and out of the car all day long. I saw him turn on the charm as he pulled open the glass doors of the stripmall shops and was greeted by the cloying smell of permanent waves. I watched him move alongside the women as they worked, careful not to interrupt them if they were talking to their clients. He was self-deprecating in a cheerful sort of way, the way a man in a woman’s world would need to be in order to blend in. I felt the sincere affection the shop operators had for my dad, they counted on him, while also putting up with his sales banter. Everyone was loved and everyone was exhausted. I think this experience allowed me to see my dad more fully.

The camera can usually allow me to step outside the frame and watch the action without being a player but this setting was more complex. I was fluctuating between the role of the dutiful daughter coming to meet Dad’s clients and being the photographer looking with a critical eye at how he earned a living. I had always questioned the value of store bought beauty, make up, permanent waves, dyes and bleaches. I rejected all of it, even the lipstick. It all felt so superfluous. This was an era of second wave feminism and I embraced the “natural” look to a fault. I was living in a very different cultural time zone from my father. Yet as I watched him work his magic with these women, many of whom he had known for years, the curtain was drawn back and I was able to appreciate his skill and dedication as well as the role beauty shops played in these women’s lives. After I finished sorting and editing all of the material I had gathered I felt an imprint of my dad buried deep into my consciousness. There was a new level of closeness between us now that I had internalized his work world.

TLC: I am curious about this imprint! Was this imprint made through making this work or was it always there and this work just brought it to surface? Are there ways that this imprint shows up in your creative life?

JD: I think the influence of my dad was always present. I learned from him the importance of showing up for work no matter what. He worked on commission all those years, if he wasn’t out selling he wasn’t making any money. It was the same for me with freelance photography. Another important quality I got from him was his genuine interest in other people. He never met a stranger. This openness to others has influenced my approach to photography. Being in the world with a camera has allowed me into other people’s lives in ways that have definitely changed mine.

There is no question in my mind that spending that week with my dad was transformational to my understanding of not only him, but the whole ecosystem of my life. I had grown up in a home that was an extension of his business. By the time I was eight I was taking orders on the phone from his clients, or rather his “Girls”, as he called the shop owners. They were invisible members of the family. When the phone rang we always answered, no matter what we were doing or what time of day they called. I think the real imprint came when I spent hours and hours on a manual typewriter transcribing the audio cassettes I made of him giving his sales pitches and discussing his philosophy of work with me. It was listening to the repetition of his voice that was the very physical imprint on me of his way of being.

TLC: I am also curious about this dual role of daughter and photographer…do you feel like those roles affected your picture-making?

When I was making this work I did not think much about the dual role of daughter and photographer. I was very comfortable photographing him and he was not shy about being my subject. When I was a child Dad was the photographer in our family. When he photographed it felt like a loving acknowledgement of us. He’d been orphaned as a young boy and never had a family so we knew how precious we were to him. When I took up photography in high school he was very excited to help me out. When I showed up to do this project he was thrilled. Yes, he wished I would wear dresses and lipstick, but our battles over his merchandise were overshadowed by the warmth we felt for one another. He finally accepted me as the hippie feminist art student that I was.

TLC: Are there some photographs that for you feel more from the daughter’s perspective and others from a more critical observer of the feminist photographer?

JD: I don’t think I can make a clear differentiation between photographs made as a daughter and those of a critical observer. When I look back on the conversations he and I were having in 1980 about women in the workplace, I realize how far we have come. (It is important to note that distance is now being threatened by the current regime). It wasn’t until 1974, when I was 22, that women could open a checking account without a male co-signer. I think the idea of a “critical feminist photographer” was built into the project by the way it is sequenced, the juxtapositions of the ads, the highlighting of the merchandise. I did not want my dad or the women he worked with, to be critiqued. I was looking to question the system.

TLC: In my opinion the strength of this work lies in that complexity and nuance. The idea that we can hold respect, love, and intimacy as well as question and critique–– that, to me, is a healthy system, whether that be a family, institution, or nation. I also feel this way about the book object itself––the images, yes, but also the text, the ads, the design, and sequencing––they all build on each other and reflect these layers of love and critique.

Can we talk about the process of making the book with Deadbeat Club? I know the work existed as a slideshow at one point. Were the ads part of the slideshow? How did the process of translating all of this work to the book format inform the content?

JD: As I said earlier, this piece was originally formatted to be a two projector slide show with an audio cassette. The audio had a track that advanced the slides on cue, making each projector fade in and out. The sounds of the girls laughing, Dad chatting, the background sound of the radio, these were all part of the presentation. It was a great way to create the feeling of a short film from still images. There is the element of live theatre when you present a slide show. I have recently converted the piece to video, so much more stable and shareable, but I miss the experience of a live audience.

I incorporated images of ads in the original slideshow but when we were putting the book together we had the idea of making the ads more abstract and placing them as a backdrop to the car photos to highlight the incessant driving involved in covering his territory. Also this weaves the idealized beauty concept throughout the story. After living with this piece for 45 years, the sequence and its relationship to the dialogue seemed immovable to me. Clint (Clint and Alex Woodside are the publishers of Deadbeat Club) upended that completely. That took my breath away, but once I got accustomed to this new version I saw what he saw. Having new eyes on work can really wake things up. Plus a book works differently than a slide show. I trusted him and I think together we came up with a new way to tell what is actually a very old and familiar story of the merchant and his customer.

Working with Clint and Alex was amazing. They are so smart and were so responsive to my questions and concerns. I pointed out that the voice of my dad talking about business should be different from the look of the dialogue and was not sure how to make that happen. Clint said, just a minute let me think about that, and KABOOM, he came back with really dramatic, big bold blue text. I would never have conceived of that and I think it works perfectly. I suggested the burnt orange cover color, drawing on both the color of the OPEN sign in the cover photo and my memory of orange being so popular in the 1970s. Orange has so much energy, just like my dad and just like the book!

TLC: I love to hear all of these details of how the book came together. I think the text design really helps keep the dialogue legible and engaging—it feels very cinematic and for me evokes iconic car dialogue scenes like in Pulp Fiction and When Harry Met Sally. I love how books can evoke other mediums.

Speaking of other mediums, you mentioned the ads being paired with the driving images. When I first viewed the book I thought of the ads as billboards, larger-than-life in our field of view, another metaphor of capitalism as a ubiquitous part of culture. I love the way the design of this layer adds to the complexity.

There are two more layers we have yet to discuss––the essays, one by your mother and one by you. I loved reading your mom’s essay—it gives this quiet counter-narrative to your father’s larger-than-life presence. It is dated 1980, was it in the original slideshow? How do her words sit with you all these years later?

JD: Clint was definitely cuing off of the idea of a screenplay with his layout of the text. The dialogue flows along in a way that allows you to dip in and out of it. You can look just at the photos or focus on the storyline or do both at once. This encourages multiple readings of both text and image. When Dad’s voice is seen in bold blue you know he is reflecting on the business of business. This allows you to see him with more dimensionality. And seeing him at home with my mom, working late into the night at the dining room table or anxious in the bathtub, or packing up his car for another day, shows the inner workings of his job life.

My mom was really smart. She read constantly but because of the Depression she had to drop out of college and go to business school. Mom had a formalness to her, she was proper, well mannered and had excellent grammar. When I first listened to her interview in 1980 I immediately thought, well, this won’t work. This doesn’t fit at all with the tone of the rest of the piece, so I never included it. Now, in the print format her words have an important role of contextualizing Dad’s job on the larger social, economic stage of the time. My parents really balanced one another: Dad was energetic, happy and often a bit naive while Mom enjoyed naps, and cigarettes and asking the bigger questions.

My dad’s personal story is pretty difficult. My essay tries to encapsulate an extremely complex life into a few paragraphs. My mother told stories of her Swiss-Austrian family all the time, they were like an episodic narrative playing in the background of my life. She had an almost perfect recall of the details of her childhood, but my dad had mostly blanked out his early years. I felt it was important to include some of his life story beyond work because we don’t exist without our past, it shapes us. I just wanted people to get to know him. And as long as people are thinking about my parents well, they are still, in some way, alive.

FOOTER:
Too Many Products Too Much Pressure by Janet Delaney is available from Deadbeat Club and includes “Life of a Salesman” essay by the artist Janet Delaney and “Wife of a Salesman” essay by the artist’s mother Connie Delaney. The book is also available in a limited special edition with custom slipcase and signed print.

Janet Delaney is an American photographer known for her poignant documentation of the intersection of work, home, and shifting city-scapes. 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, the High Museum and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston. She earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and held a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley.

Follow Janet Delaney on Instagram.

Tracy L Chandler is a photographer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her monograph A POOR SORT OF MEMORY is now available from Deadbeat Club.

Follow Tracy L Chandler on Instagram.