Part occasioned by a conference on the topic and part inspired by a tremendous personal photograph collection in its possesion, Boston University has started running an exhibit of vernacular photography. Essentially, the concept is similar to that of found photography, without the connotation of the Artist discovering the objects and transforming them, a la ready-made, into Art. Vernacular is an umbrella term for photographs not taken expressly as high-art objects: snapshots, commercial photography, photojournalism, commemoration, mug shots, you name it. Furthermore, the arthistroryspeak
term suggests a polemic, namely that these non-art photographs contain qualities of photographic art despite their anonymity, or that the ones that do not still function as social history and are deserving of institutional recognition and display.
The photographs sort pretty evenly into those two categories, but in each they’re such wonderful examples the exhibit should not be passed over for higher profile ones in the city. Mind you, it’s woefully undercurated; the photographs are simply divided into four conceptual categories (Yardstick, Surrogate, Archive, and Proof … the metaphysics of arthistoryspeak get particularly oppressive here) without much specificity and certainly none of the conventionally historical, topical or aesthetic kind. This led the Phoenix to complain loudly.
This may be the least-worked-on, least-organized, least-considered show of its size (or pretense) I’ve laid eyes on. No overarching principle, no thoughtful juxtapositions, no history, no effort at organization in terms of themes or methods or styles or time periods troubles “In the Vernacular.” Visits with Santa appear in the vicinity of automobile ads that in turn appear next to family Polaroids that are next to the wreck of the Hindenburg.
I had a similar initial reaction - the idea was so ripe for picking, the photographs so marvelous, that I couldn’t help but imagine the connections being made, illuminating narratives being drawn from the raw material. And I do think that work needs to be done. But in reflection, I’m not sure the haphazard arrangement of photos wasn’t salutory. For one thing, the exhibit isn’t so large that viewing it all is arduous or that any photo gets lost. More crucially, the lack of interpretive frame makes the viewer approach each photograph as its own object. There’s a tendency when approaching images of the past, especially if they’re not canonical forms of photographic art, to emphasize the past quality and not the image quality. That is, we’re happy to read a 1912 commercial photograph as a relic of a past historical time. We’re less eager to see it possessing similar aesthetic qualities of an award-winning Herald photo or the iconic Marilyn Monroe pinup shot. This alienation effect may well have been accident on the part of the exhibit curators, but it’s a welcome accident.
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