In March 1980, Janet Delaney, then at the start of a distinguished photography career, spent a week shadowing her father Bill at work. He was a beauty supply salesman and he spent his days driving between hair and beauty salons in Los Angeles in a 1964 Plymouth Valiant. Delaney had grown up speaking to her father’s customers, who would call the family home at all hours asking for curlers or perms. But she had never accompanied her father on the job before. “I never even thought about it,” she says. “There was no take-your-daughter-to-work day.”
Bill was 65 and soon to retire when this photo was taken, but Delaney remembers struggling to keep pace. “He would make 10 or 12 calls a day, in and out of the car and chatting up these women” in the salons. In a video she made using her photographs and audio recordings from that week, you can hear Bill charming and haggling with his customers, who clearly have a deep affection for him. “Working in a beauty shop is not the most masculine thing that the average man thinks of doing,” he admits in one clip. “In fact it’s very difficult to find men that can go into a beauty salon and handle themselves properly, and not think that every girl wants to be patted here and there and making eyes at him and whatever. It’s a business.”
In this image, titled Farrah Fawcett Hairstyle, you can see Bill at the back, fully absorbed in a transaction while, in the foreground, a customer and a salon employee turn their attention towards his daughter. “They all knew me,” Delaney recalls. “I was taken aback by that.” It turns out her dad had over the years been showing off family photos to his customers. “They were super happy to see me after all this time.”
For Delaney, these photos, now gathered into a marvellous book that has been shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz photo book awards, shows a world that’s fast disappearing, as in-person sales relationships are replaced by online interactions. “That intimacy was so integral to [Bill’s] success,” she says. “There’s a very fundamental part of our business world now that’s losing that sense of personal trust.”
Janet Delaney: Too Many Products, Too Much Pressure is published by Deadbeat Club (£42)
Photograph by Janet Delaney/Deadbeat Club