“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.
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