Vernacular photographies

Abstract

How can photography be restored to its own history? And how can we ensure this history will be both materially grounded and conceptually expansive, just like the medium itself? Well, perhaps we should start by considering what has ahnost always been excluded from photography's history: ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought (or sometimes bought and then made over) by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy. Elaborately cased daguerreotypes, ambrotype jewellery embellished with twists of human hair, certificates bearing the tintype portraits of those they authorize, enamelled faces fixed to metal memorial roundels, image-impregnated pillows and quilts, snapshot albums, panoramas of church groups, wedding pictures, formal portraits of the family dog, lampshades projecting dad's last fishing trip, baby photos paired with bronzed booties, coffee mugs emblazoned with pictures of the kids, snowdomes containing a girlfriend's photogenic smile; this is the popular face of photography, so popular that it has been largely ignored by the critical gaze of respectable history. To these examples could be added a multitude of equally neglected indigenous genres and practices, from gilt Indian albumen prints, to American painted and framed tintypes, to Mexican fotoescultura, to Nigerian ibeji images. Taken together, these ordinary and/or regional artefacts represent the troublesome field of vernacular photography; they are the abject photographies for which an appropriate history must now be written.1