Living in Venice where cascades of suspended laundry dangle overhead like hanging gardens, I began to realize that a woman's clothes line is like a bird's song; it says to the world: "This is me. This is my family. This is my territory." Each casalinga (traditional Italian housewife) has her own style of hanging out clothes. It is her signature, her line of music written in the air.

I began to photograph these expressions of self: the lines of clean clothes stretched across Venetian canals and courtyards or on cords propped up on oars & sticks in open spaces on islands in the Venetian Lagoon. I began to make friends with the old casalinghe and to hear their stories. For 20 years I have photographed them and their art of hanging their clothes out to dry.

As I interviewed and videotaped these Venetian women, I became aware that for many of them a woman's laundry tableau was more than a means of self-expression; it was part of an ancient ritual. For a woman who chooses to hang out her clothes with style, her laundry cord is the site of little altars, votive offerings to her Lares and Penates, her private household's gods and goddesses. It can be her little outpost against decay & entropy. Or, it might be, as it is for those of us who don't take the time to hang laundry with style, a surrender to entropy itself.

A casalinga named Antonia succinctly summed up her position on women's significance in global matters: "My laundry, my kitchen, my home—I make sure that these things are done right. If a family doesn't have a strong mamma at its center, it falls apart. And if families don't work, then the world doesn't work either."

Over the years of looking at Venetian laundry I notice that styles of hanging clean clothes out to dry in the sun and air have changed. Older Venetian casalinghe now sadly tell me that their daughters and granddaughters have no style at all—they are too busy working outside of the home to care about ancient domestic rituals. Soon Italian culture will be Americanized, they fear. Women will become like men. They may even buy dryers.