Domésticas (Portuguese for "domestic servants"), photographed by Andrej Balco during a two-month residency in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2007, examines domestic labor and the intimate social worlds shared by employers and household workers.
Made through the International Photography Research Network’s Changing Faces program, the project turns to a form of work embedded in Brazil’s long history of inequality. Balco situates domestic service within a social order shaped by colonial legacies, class hierarchy, and the persistent proximity of wealth and poverty in Rio de Janeiro. Rather than treating these divisions as abstract statistics, he examines how they are lived inside private homes, where labor remains both essential and largely unseen. At the same time, the series considers how dependency, familiarity, and authority coexist, so that relationships marked by hierarchy can also involve trust, routine, and emotional closeness.
Balco uses color photography and a restrained, frontal mode of portraiture to place employers and workers into direct comparison. Many works are organized as triptychs: a portrait of the employer, a portrait of the domestic worker, and a detail of the shared environment. In contrast to the environmental views, the close-up portraits strip away many usual markers of status and identity, prompting the viewer to ask who is who within the relationship before the surrounding context reasserts those distinctions. Glass walls, gates, railings, pools, uniforms, and interior furnishings then become recurring markers of distance and connection. The compositions are static and carefully ordered, while the domestic spaces themselves register sharp contrasts, from expansive villas to compact living quarters. This measured approach gives the series an observational tone, allowing social boundaries to appear through posture, clothing, and setting.
Balco worked with medium-format cameras and supplementary artificial light, using a slower process that encouraged extended encounters with his subjects. In reception, Domésticas became Balco’s best-known project, winning a special prize at Fotofestiwal in Lodz in 2009 and circulating in exhibitions and publication soon after, including later presentations at Bratislava’s Central European House of Photography (SEDF). It is often discussed in relation to a broader shift in Slovak documentary photography toward more constructed, concept-driven forms, while remaining closely tied to the specific social realities of Brazil in the 2000s.
