Janet Delaney’s father, Bill, worked as a salon-to-salon salesman, peddling hair and beauty products throughout the greater Los Angeles area for thirty-two years. In 1980, when Delaney was twenty-seven and her father was preparing to retire, she decided to photograph him at work. She disdained the things her father sold—Revlon “Ever-So-Lively,” Revlon Realistic rubber bands with perm rods, Diamond Delight by the gallon. “I would use none of it. In my mind, Revlon represented capitalism’s oppressive hold on women’s self-image,” she writes in a new book of photographs, “Too Many Products Too Much Pressure,” which is being published, by the Los Angeles-based indie press Deadbeat Club, forty-five years after she took the pictures. “At the time, I was a bushy-haired hippie,” Delaney, who is now seventy-three, told me. “I was a feminist, and I wouldn’t wear lipstick, and I wouldn’t do my hair up or wear nylons or any of the things that my dad attributed to success and a good presentation,” she added.

Back when Delaney was growing up, Bill was practically the only father on their street who wore a suit to work. He was soft-spoken and always polite—a trait he had needed to survive a precarious childhood in Chicago. Born in 1915, he was adopted from an orphanage at age two; by the time he was ten, both of his adoptive parents had died. He moved in with his adoptive grandfather, who left him at home alone every night while he worked as a watchman. When a local priest heard about this, he arranged for Bill to work as a live-in houseboy for a wealthy widow whom Bill came to call Mother Wood. But she didn’t “step into a familial role,” Delaney told me. When her fortune was wiped out in the Great Depression, Bill had to move out, and he went to work as a stock boy, then as an usher at a movie theatre, and then as a truck dispatcher, before becoming a beauty-product salesman. In 1941, Bill met Delaney’s mother, Connie, and married her just three months later. They both “came from nothing,” Delaney told me, and saw having a family as an achievement. (Connie’s parents had had a rough divorce.) “There was a real resilience and a sense of love in the house,” Delaney said.

Delaney’s older brother and sister were born in Chicago, but the family moved to Compton, California, before she was born. She was thirteen in 1965, when the Watts Rebellion ignited through nearby neighborhoods. Her sister, who was ten years older, had graduated from Berkeley and married a man who turned out to have schizophrenia. She moved home with a three-month-old baby, and Delaney listened to her sister talk about the progressive ideas she had learned at college. They decided that Delaney would spend a summer living with her in Haight-Ashbury, helping to look after the child. Those months made a huge impression on Delaney. (She remembers her mother asking what it had been like. “Mom, it was far out,” was all she could say.) Her parents’ world now felt like a place “where everything was artifice,” she said. “Everything was makeup and hairdos and clothing.”

In eleventh grade, Delaney signed up for a photography class. There, she was introduced to her first camera, a Yashica. The darkroom felt safe. “I created a life based on making sure I could be a photographer,” she said. In 1979, she enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the San Francisco Art Institute. (Bill sold enough products to send all three of his kids to college.) She had spent six months in Central America taking photographs a couple of years before, but those pictures didn’t reflect the feelings she had experienced while taking them. She wanted to be “working from the inside,” she decided. She told her father that she wanted him to be her subject, and he agreed to the project without hesitation. Soon, she learned that he’d been telling the women at the salons all about her. “When I showed up with a camera, nobody was surprised, because they knew I was a photographer,” she said. “They knew so much about me and they were just charmed to meet me, finally.” Bill had been showing them pictures of his kids for decades.

“Too Many Products Too Much Pressure” is, in part, a psychological portrait of Delaney’s father at work. Looking at the photographs, you feel his anxiety and exhaustion, his awareness of playing the part of a salesman, and the accumulation of paperwork as he makes his sales; the more he does, the more there is to do. In one image, he lies in a bubble bath, but his expression is one of alarm, as though he is staring at all the work he has done and has yet to finish. Any disdain that Delaney may have had for his occupation seems to melt away, particularly as the women who work in and run the salons appear in the pictures. At one salon, above a row of glass-bowl hairdryers, there’s a poster showing a perm machine from the nineteen-twenties that looks like something out of Frankenstein’s lab. A woman is attached to it, her hands clasped as though begging for mercy. Farther along the wall are the framed and embroidered words, “Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.” Delaney photographs the salon employees as they stare into space, or negotiate good-naturedly with Bill, or coax short fine hair onto rollers.

Delaney interviewed her father for the project, too, and his quotes appear in the book. “Working in a beauty shop is not the most masculine thing that the average man thinks about doing,” he told her. Still, he was proud of being a salesman. “I know that nothing happens until something is sold,” he said. Bill taught Delaney how to talk to anyone, she told me, which proved to be a useful skill for an artist who mainly photographs strangers. She also learned to embrace a “constant feeling of work.” And she learned the importance of recording things that otherwise disappear—“I’m an archivist at heart,” she told me. When her mother would talk about her family, Delaney’s father “would get really quiet,” she said. She and her siblings would ask him about his family, and he would reply, “Well, I don’t have much to say.” She realized later that her father “photographed so much.” He was consciously creating a record for his kids that he didn’t have of his own childhood; also, “he liked gadgets.” Now his children have 8-mm. movies, “a huge amount” of color slides, and carefully compiled albums with deckle-edged pictures and white-ink captions.

There is something in Delaney’s images that makes us want to understand and know her father—and, perhaps, to know the Bills in our own lives better. Delaney showed the photographs in Chicago, and a man came up to her afterward. He was “worked up, a little anxious,” she said, “and he goes, ‘I just have to go home and talk to my dad right away.’ ”