Home instruction manual

When I saw Jan McCullough’s book HOME INSTRUCTION MANUAL for the first time, I had the feeling of following a playful path through text and images. It is literally an on field research and experience. Starting from information found across websites and forums, googling the keyword 'how to make a home', the photographer decided to rent an ordinary empty house in the suburbs of Belfast, and use it as a case study.

Inside of this bare, anonymous house, over a period of two months, she tried to put into practice the instructions and suggestions collected online.

I don’t know why I always liked instruction manuals (especially the explaining pictures inside); maybe it's because I don’t like to waste time, and I like things done well. If someone, at some point, would give me a manual about the perfect household, it would end up in the garbage for sure. As a woman in contemporary society, I would probably refuse to follow any manual that makes me feel like a 50s housewife.

This book though is not about how to build and run the perfect household, but more about trying to make an anonymous – and kinda ugly – house into your home. I lived in a series of different rented apartments, with furniture I didn't choose, ugly painting on the wall etc.. I have to say that some of the tricks and advice that McCullough found out was also adopted by myself in some cases. 

In print or book form, McCullough’s photographs of the perfect home are very different from what one would naturally expect, that is, desirable and cosy environments. They seem pretty cold and purely documentary, the only human presence is the hand of the photographer that appears in some images. This work doesn't pretend to portray a beautiful house that we can find in fancy magazines, but the making of a real home, where real people live, a place where mess makes a room more cosy, where the bookshelf is full of commercial bestsellers. Through her research on online forums and users' comments, McCullough gives us a glimpse of how common people live their homes.

The book is conceived and designed to literally recall an instruction manual; at the beginning we can find a map of the apartment – as an orientation tool – and by flicking through the pages we have the impression of looking at a journal, with daily progress, tips and impressions. An experience lived in first person.

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, McCullough embarked on developing HOME INSTRUCTION MANUAL in 2014, a year after her graduation from the Belfast School of Art. The project was finalized in the creation of a dummy book that won the 2015 Kassel dummy book award and in 2016 has become a book published by  Verlag Kettler.

Buy the book here