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.