How many years have to pass before a photograph album begins to develop a real fascination, and not just for its various participants?
And how long does that fascination last, before the book, the shoebox, the envelope is destined for the black bin bag of history? Ten years? The lifetime of the children in the photographs? Any longer?
As long as the photos can be seen they will fascinate? There’s been some discussion recently about vernacular photography – vs. people’s personal flickr type albums, the distinction between the two in terms of the value, artistic or otherwise, of such imagery.
It seems as though the older (nostalgia value) the images are and their anonymity gives them added value and interest, but the context they’re then presented in and by who also counts? Did you see that spread in the Saturday Guardian a few weeks ago – a found collection of strange holiday snaps made over years by a taxi driver of his mysterious female client? I wish I’d kept it now!
Hmm, I’ve been thinking on this a lot recently. Vernacular photography as an idiom, is probably something different to just everyones generic collections of everything, isn’t it? I don’t know, I’d have to look at a lot more of them, I think.
Time is certainly something that increases their fashion-value, and the fashion itself for ‘retro’ meaning anything including people wearing funny clothes re the above. (That photo on the right was taken with a 3D camera, and has lovely fruity colours in real life.)
I’ve been finding myself drawn to both old photos – personal and found – and to creating old-style images with a modern twist. I think, for me, both act in a nostalgic sense (although there is the strange and related question of how we can have nostalgia for a time and place which we never experienced), but in terms of creating new work there is something attractive about creating images that feel like they have just washed up from some distant era… I would cite this in the context of the writing of Borges or Calvino who explore similar themes about the nature of reality and truth, and the possibility of their artificial creation.
Having said that I’m not sure I’d term much of this ‘vernacular’, certainly not in the same way as social documentary work. More along those lines I’m reminded of Tillmans’s exhibition of a few years back ‘if one thing matters, everything matters’… I like that sentiment, and I think it applies to the love of old albums in that they all become interesting to an aficionado, but at the same time a lot of the individual images making up the collection aren’t very good…
[...] that in a longer post to come; thoughts which tie in with reification, vernacularism (via f-lux, here) , the ‘we are all photographers now’ syndrome, and a few other things that’ve [...]
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As long as the photos can be seen they will fascinate? There’s been some discussion recently about vernacular photography – vs. people’s personal flickr type albums, the distinction between the two in terms of the value, artistic or otherwise, of such imagery.
http://squareamerica.com/
http://www.houseplantpicturestudio.com/index2.html
http://www.usefulphotography.com/
It seems as though the older (nostalgia value) the images are and their anonymity gives them added value and interest, but the context they’re then presented in and by who also counts? Did you see that spread in the Saturday Guardian a few weeks ago – a found collection of strange holiday snaps made over years by a taxi driver of his mysterious female client? I wish I’d kept it now!
Hmm, I’ve been thinking on this a lot recently. Vernacular photography as an idiom, is probably something different to just everyones generic collections of everything, isn’t it? I don’t know, I’d have to look at a lot more of them, I think.
Time is certainly something that increases their fashion-value, and the fashion itself for ‘retro’ meaning anything including people wearing funny clothes re the above. (That photo on the right was taken with a 3D camera, and has lovely fruity colours in real life.)
When he started, Parr was thought of as producing vernacular photography, wasn’t he? Social realism.
I didn’t see the Grauniad thing no, sounds marvellous, will see if I can gnab one from somewhere.
*goes off to fooster through those links*
I’ve been finding myself drawn to both old photos – personal and found – and to creating old-style images with a modern twist. I think, for me, both act in a nostalgic sense (although there is the strange and related question of how we can have nostalgia for a time and place which we never experienced), but in terms of creating new work there is something attractive about creating images that feel like they have just washed up from some distant era… I would cite this in the context of the writing of Borges or Calvino who explore similar themes about the nature of reality and truth, and the possibility of their artificial creation.
Having said that I’m not sure I’d term much of this ‘vernacular’, certainly not in the same way as social documentary work. More along those lines I’m reminded of Tillmans’s exhibition of a few years back ‘if one thing matters, everything matters’… I like that sentiment, and I think it applies to the love of old albums in that they all become interesting to an aficionado, but at the same time a lot of the individual images making up the collection aren’t very good…
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[...] that in a longer post to come; thoughts which tie in with reification, vernacularism (via f-lux, here) , the ‘we are all photographers now’ syndrome, and a few other things that’ve [...]