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Defining Vernacular Photography

“I think of the friends

Who came to see me, of what yesterday 

Was like.

A peculiar slant

Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model”

— John Ashbery, from “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

I can remember the first time I heard the term Vernacular Photography. It struck me as a quirky term and immediately piqued my curiosity. So naturally, I googled it, which lead to the general view that Vernacular Photography as a whole is comprised of ‘snapshots of everyday, ordinary experience’. I’ve since come to realize that it has as much to do with singularity of experience.

When we encounter a great Vernacular Photograph - our response is far from our experience of the ‘ordinary’; it’s a visceral one, an immediate, intuitive connection, one that we lack the language to describe.

I moved to Los Angeles last year to take a job as curator to a private collector's vernacular photography collection. Being ‘language’ and ‘meaning’ driven, I began the endeavor by attempting a definition:

Vernacular Photography is less concerned with the codified aspects of the medium than it is with the subject before its lens. What distinguishes a great vernacular photograph from an ordinary snapshot is some element of strangeness, obliqueness or otherness, some juxtaposition - whether intentional or not - which sets it apart from ordinary experience, achieving a formal perfection which aligns it with some universal, individual, parochial or quintessential experience.

This definition approximated my understanding and helped -- temporarily - guide me through the new terrain that I was exploring. But I quickly learned that I'd need to toss off all of my expectations and preconceptions, and continue along the road without map or compass, as my world of thought was being completely re-charted.

The Language of Vernacular Photography

"There is a war on. Everyone is separated and afraid. It is as if we have been robbed of a language to describe the bewildered brokenness we inhabit. Best to leave and learn another language."

— 'Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography:

Two Early Novels', by Deborah Levy

I come from a background in Art History and Aesthetics, and so naturally I had brought with me a certain way of looking at, seeing, processing, and analyzing images.

But unlike in Art History, when it comes to vernaculars, there's no system of understanding, there is only that visceral one, where our comprehension works not in a linear or logical way.

Over time, I became un-moored from my comfort zones and systems of thought, and began to connect deeply with the un-tethered nature of these photographs.

This lack of grounding is something that for the most part, like a slanted house, people run from.

And those who choose to stay in this slanted place find themselves unable to return to living in the more mundane world of flat houses.

Frames of Reference

“I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.”
— John Ashbery, from “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

 
How does one begin to understand a system that has no rules? A system that can't be defined or explained because it operates outside of the rules of - not necessarily ordinary - but ‘expected’ experience.

As well as having a background in Art, I'm also math minded, and so, I'm always looking for things to make sense, for things to add up. I found myself sliding down many levels of thought which were more abstract than direct. I was down the rabbit hole.

Soon enough, I began to dream about these photos, and the people who inhabit them; they began to infuse not only my waking and working life, but my dreaming one. And I began to conceive of them as not just photographs that other people ‘took’, but ones that needed to be taken. Moments that were recognized as having some essential nature which needed to be captured.

As much as the ‘feeling’ of encountering a great Vernacular left me without words, there was an undeniable, inexorable quality to them. And although chance may have played a role in their coming into being, the fact remains that each of these photos has been kept, saved, or otherwise salvaged for one reason only: each hand that has held it had felt the necessity of its existence.

Soon enough, my frame of reference, Art History, began to limit and confine my thinking, and, like a giant in a low-ceilinged room, I needed more thought-space.

I began to look at Photographs which made any claims to ‘Art’ with skepticism; even the slightest hint of being staged left me disappointed. More than that, disapproving: of any inauthenticity, of any intentionality, of any ego attached to its creation. I had crossed the vernacular threshold fully now, with both feet, crossing into this new terrain. With no map or compass, I was free to wander.

Untethering

“Long ago

The strewn evidence meant something,

The small accidents and pleasures

Of the day as it moved gracelessly on,

A housewife doing chores. Impossible now

To restore those properties in the silver blur.”

— John Ashbery,

from “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

Every Vernacular photograph comes to us untethered to meaning and intention, ego-less, anonymous - free from critique - Inviting a freedom of thought which is in many ways closer to Poetry than it is to History. But unlike Poetry, it is a wordless space, for the most part, languageless, wherein our eyes and minds are free to wander and wonder. And while the person behind the lens of each of these photographs might or might not have had a conscious intention, we can never fully know. Our thoughts and imaginings take flight and spin and whirl all at once, in all directions. Eventually, I began to find my frame of reference was more aligned with Physics than with any other field.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

“It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, 

but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. 

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? 

It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.” 
— Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

To be alive is to be conscious. While this statement seems an obvious fact, the dailyness of existence lulls us into living our lives rather than experiencing them. 

These photographs are testaments to the fictions - as well as facts - of our experience, and in the greatest of them, that awareness is what is perhaps the most ‘palpable’: That someone, at some point in time, stood in *that* spot, and shot that photo: and that “I”, at this moment in time, am beholding the very fact of this photo, is the invisible bond between the anonymous snapshot and the viewer.

This is a connection that I don’t find or feel in photographs which make any claims to being "Art". And it is this aspect that all found snapshots have in common. They are all linked in this dual necessity: the necessity of their having ‘had’ to be taken, and the necessity of their having ‘had’ to be saved. This is a powerful attachment, and one that is unique to found photography. Its *necessity* is embedded in its being.

Stopping Time

“Both Galileo and Newton and most people up until the 20th century

thought that time was the same for everyone everywhere. This is the basis

for timelines, where time is a parameter. Our modern conception of time is based on Einstein's theory of relativity, in which rates of time run differently depending on relative motion, and space and time are merged into spacetime, where we live on a world line rather than a timeline.” — Wikipedia

Vernacular Photography is as much about ‘capturing’ a fleeting moment as it is about stopping that moment from fleeting, stopping time; it's a duality that resides within each frame of every photograph ever taken. This juxtaposition creates an inner tension, inner forces that cannot be pulled apar.

Every photograph is a time-capsule; the instant any photograph is taken, it is evidence, ‘proof’ of existence, of time’s inexorable march, and our desire to stop and ‘fix’ it. While all material is temporal and changes and moves through time, Photography is the art that comes closest to stillness.

On a micro scale, each individual photo is rooted in a particular place, time, and experience.

On a macro scale, from a bird’s eye perspective, all snapshots ever created, and all the ones yet to be taken, tell a story of the human condition, unburdened by knowledge, reason, or critique

Eschewing our need to order, they embrace the beautiful chaos that resides at the heart of every human occasion. When the party is over and the music stops playing, snapshots are all we have left.

An Act of Persuasion

“Perhaps an angel looks like everything

We have forgotten, I mean forgotten

Things that don't seem familiar when

We meet them again, lost beyond telling,

Which were ours once.”

— John Ashbery,

from “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

Some would describe the Vernacular Photograph as a happy accident. But like every good argument, there is a purpose-driven consideration that is weighed in a flash of an instant, before the shooter clicks the shutter and commits that moment to history.

A snapshot is an act of persuasion, and in that persuasion we are lead to believe that that ephemeral moment - above all - was destined to be remembered. It lives & breathes through our eyes, minds, souls and hearts. In inhabits that rarefied space of things that go without question.

The internal conjuring that occurs within the frame of the great vernacular photograph - an admixture of air, objects, events, observations, gesture, expression, whether accidental or constructed, relies as much upon chance as it does on chemistry. In that complex, chimerical moment, everything is fused and all the elements function to serve that one sole purpose: to fix that moment, find its form.

The mind, the eye & the camera, are not always in synch. Near & far, presence and absence, now and then, mistake and intention, these opposites often enjoy a frictious relationship throughout the history of Vernacular Photography: a woman hanging laundry whose face we will never know; a group of well dressed men and women, walking down a muddy road in the mist, inexplicably; the girl, perhaps the one that got away, standing at the edge of the diving board, whose name is penned in the margin in bold black caps, and in so doing, she is remembered forever, 'LORRAINE'.

In each great Vernacular Photograph, there is one hinge element which is the glue, the one thing without which, it would be an ordinary snapshot. The result reads as metaphor rather than momento, and the image before the lens takes on new meaning which is aligned with our idea of the past rather than the fact: it oscillates, ricochets, and resonates within our imaginings. We are lured in, seduced, and finally hooked by its conviction, by that unquestionable, strange and miraculous event.
 

The Observer Effect

“In science, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed. “
— Wikipedia

We live in a world that needs to come to conclusions, and for this reason many people find vernacular photographs to be perplexing: because there's no system understanding, because there's no formalized method of deciphering, where no single principal abides. There’s a freedom of thought that’s invited, which translates to a freedom of mind.

It’s because there is no understanding or spelled-out frame-of-reference that language is let loose in our imaginations and our minds, let loose in such a way that we begin to question our own comfortable modes of perceiving the world that we currently live in. Any conclusion we draw will lead us down a path of more questions; a feedback loop of continual inquiry which will never be answered. The only conclusion we can come to is that there is no understanding, only interpretation.

You must come to these photos on their own terms, with new eyes; the terms run the entire gamut of thought, feeling, emotion: acceptance, hope, empathy, clarity, confusion, condemnation, frustration, resignation, redemption. And while no doubt, we change things in the act of our observation of them, as is the case with snapshots, it turns out that the opposite of one expected is – also – what is true, and that everything you think is occurring or is about to occur happened differently, and was about something else, entirely.

The vernacular photograph exists on all levels of thought, space and time, it is never an either-or situation, it breaks all rules of logic, it doesn’t add up, is more than the sum of its parts. And while it is true that the photo is changed by our beholding of it, the world is also changed, and more than anything, we are changed forever changed by them. They make us believe that all things and everything is possible, and that all thoughts, feelings, and interpretations are valid: a never-ending party to which everyone is invited. All shapes, sizes, colors and conditions are welcomed.

Vernacular photographs represent an ecstatic embrace of the human condition, and those who are beguiled by a leak of light, who have felt that raw, inexplicable delight, find there’s no way back from the brink of that beauty.


- Vanessa Daou

Closing statement — Q&A

(applause)


Thank you so much. I just want to give my final words here to thank Ron Slattery for curating this incredible event, Comfort Station and all of those who have scoured the earth in the collection, preservation, and appreciation of these extraordinary orphaned photographs.

I'd also like to thank my collector whose name, like these photographs, shall remain anonymous. 

(applause)

Thank you so much. It's been an absolutely incredible journey, to say the least. Every day something miraculous happens or their site or there some big breakthrough a revelation and everything changes. My whole world is constantly shifting, it's really a whole paradigm shift that has occurred since I've been curating, and not just curating, but absorbing these images, looking at them and bringing them into my world and my life. It's really been a profound experience for me.

So if any of you have questions.........