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.