Ordinary Pictures and Accidental Masterpieces: Snapshot Photography in the Modern Art Museum

Abstract

In a seminal essay titled “Vernacular Photographies,” first published in 2000, the photography scholar Geoffrey Batchen calls for us to “restore photography to its own history.”1 Too often, photography has been the square peg forced into the round hole of an art-historical discourse grounded in painting, its visual structures and aesthetics. To better understand photography as an idea, a visual medium, and a concrete visual practice on its own terms, we need to better interrogate the breadth and complexity of the visual objects we call photographs. In particular, Batchen calls attention to the pervasive but remarkably understudied category of photography he describes as “ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought … by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy.”