Talk:Vernacular photography

Rename

Should we not rename to Amateur photography per WP:COMMONAME? Shawn in Montreal (talk) 20:30, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Amateur photography is not vernacular photography

"Amateur photographer" shouldn't redirect to vernacular photography, and amateur photography is different than vernacular photography. Amateur photographers do everything professional photographers do and may even sell their photos, it's just not as their main profession. Vernacular photographers take photos of their children, their dogs, or their friends etc. The snapshot aesthetic also has nothing to do with amateur photography. Χρυσάνθη Λυκούση (talk) 03:47, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Referencing

Imagebeau, thank you for your work on this. The article is, I should guess, better than it was before.

I have to guess, because I'm not given the evidence with which I can judge. (I could of course go looking for the evidence myself, but I plead laziness.)

Here's a particularly conspicuous example: The American collector Peter J. Cohen currently dominates vernacular photography in U.S. museums. This is a major claim. Who says it, and where?

I'm very underinformed about this area, and perhaps this is one reason why the books I first think of are The Book of Shadows, The Art of the American Snapshot, The Three Graces: Snapshots of Twentieth-Century Women, Women in Trees, and Amateur (Lifshitz). -- Hoary (talk) 08:03, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Hoary, thanks for your help. I've made a few changes. Please keep prodding me if you think I need it.

Some of the books you mention are good, and there are many more. Is a general booklist relevant, though? -- Imagebeau (talk) 16:29, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Imagebeau. A major prod in the section below: it's an amicable prod; I hope that it's accepted in the spirit intended. No, I don't recommend a general booklist. And in retrospect I wonder why I listed those books, other than in an effort to get myself thinking. But once I did start thinking, I thought of Party Photographer (attributed by Arjan de Nooy to the fictional Pep Jansen), and the subgenre of humorously repurposed vernacular photography. But then it occurred to me that (i) perhaps Party Photographer has less in common with a pile of photos one might pick up in a flea-market (if very lucky) than with Elisabeth Tonnard's In This Dark Wood, which repurposes what I suppose might be called "vernacular commercial photography", and (ii) perhaps all the vernacular photography that's presented as such is more or less repurposed. So now I'm thoroughly confused. Over to you (or others) to sort it all out! -- Hoary (talk) 23:48, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Origin of the term

The article now tells us that the term:

was originally defined in 2000 by the art historian Geoffrey Batchen as [...]

Arguably, Batchen was the first to define it in such and such a way, but Google Books quickly reveals that the term had been used earlier. See in particular George Abbott White, "Vernacular Photography: FSA Images of Depression Leisure," Studies in Visual Communication 9 (1983), 53–75 (and available here, without any paywall). And this isn't a term that White uses casually: see in particular the lengthy first endnote to his paper, but also the body of the paper. -- Hoary (talk) 23:48, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

I notice that White went on to coauthor a relevant book that sounds interesting. -- Hoary (talk) 00:19, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Writing in Parr-'n'-Badger The Photobook: A History volume 2, Badger describes Wisconsin Death Trip [a pretty terrible article!] as a high point of the 1970s interest in [what Badger calls] "vernacular photography". It's a long time since I last saw Wisconsin Death Trip, and offhand I can't think of any other books of the time that might be associated with it. As for much later publications, there's the Archive of Modern Conflict and so much more. -- Hoary (talk) 13:19, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Hoary, thank you again. I've made a simple fix and added a little historical context (the two words vernacular plus photography are less important than the idea, which is actually due to Szarkowski).

I did add a skeleton booklist. Problem here is the vernacular/found photo divide. To stay on the vernacular side, I chose mostly books that deal interestingly with one subgenre or another--postcards, snapshots, etc.--but don't really have artistic ideas of their own.

Please criticize. Thanks. Imagebeau (talk) 23:17, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes, good. This is, after all, an encyclopedia, not a discursive dictionary; and therefore an article should normally be about a concept rather than a term. It's quite normal for a concept to be commonly named XYZ, but also given other names, and for this same term XYZ also to be used for other purposes; however, it helps if we can also briefly comment on the meanings that we don't intend, all in an effort to reduce the risk of confusion. -- Hoary (talk) 09:00, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Hoary. I'll think about this, but basically I think it might add confusion and hairiness to bring in older uses of the phrase that even specialists like me didn't know about. -- Imagebeau (talk) 15:02, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

On nonrecontextualization

Here's what for me is a bit of an oddity:

the current “vernacular photos” are not being taken out of context or reinterpreted in any way

I realize that no photographic Duchamp is signing them "R Mutt" or whatever; but having snapshots of our very youthful (great) grandparents appear in Ossian Brown's Haunted Air (or its website) or of them, as a booze-fueled lark, wearing each other's clothes in Cohen's Snapshots of Dangerous Women -- this for me takes them out of context. Of course the dangerous in the latter title isn't meant literally; but the notion of the book seems to be "Here are the women that, eighty years ago, your mother would have warned you about", which very likely is a reinterpretation. Still, maybe the idea here is good and it just needs a bit of rephrasing. -- Hoary (talk) 09:00, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Hoary, I'm thinking about editing the "Found Photography" page to clear things up. To compare snapshots to snapshots: the clearest case of a snapshot show that comes down on the "found photos" side of the divide is the Met's (Thomas Walther's/Mia Fineman's) "Other Pictures." Walther had no interest in snapshot photography per se. He didn't care about anything depicted in the photos, how they were made, or if they actually worked differently from the art photography he also collected. He was interested simply in "finding," in the technical sense, snapshots that pleased him aesthetically precisely the way the rest of his collection pleased him. He did what snapshot collectors generally do: he exploited the law of large numbers to assemble a few beautiful accidents, where "beautiful" is understood to mean beautiful by his standards. But he was unusually "pure" even for a snapshot collector in that his eye registered only images of strictly formal interest.

Peter Cohen is very much interested in subject matter and in snapshots as snapshots generally. Unlike most collectors, he doesn't care about aesthetics and at bottom isn't choosy at all. His sole contribution is not as an eye but as a categorizer--a kind of sub-academic taxonomist, if you like. So he's leaving the pictures in context.

Here's an analogy, since Duchamp is lurking in the background here. Duchamp took the bottle rack of "Bottle Rack" out of context: that's clear. He aestheticized something that was never intended aesthetically. That's the Walther case. But say he just categorized bottle racks. Maybe some were different shapes, or they were supposed to hold different numbers of bottles, or whatever. That's the Cohen case: they're still bottle racks in every way. His eye and his brain aren't "adding" anything. -- Imagebeau (talk) 15:34, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Imagebeau, I hadn't even realized that there was an article on found photography. (Its very earliest version was not promising, but did have a good edit summary.) I'm starting to understand the distinction between "vernacular" and "found" (or perhaps just deluding myself that I am). Thank you for putting me right (or at least setting me off in the right direction). Hmm, perhaps Lifshitz's Amateur (at least as packaged for/by Steidl) is less vernacular than found. -- Hoary (talk) 22:44, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Dichotomy?

As I think of some fairly well known photography, among what I come up with are what Emmy Andriesse, "Chim" Seymour, O. Winston Link, Elliott Erwitt, and Lewis Hine are respectively most known for. These œuvres hardly seem to be "vernacular", and they hardly seem to be "(fine) art". How would Szarkowski, MoMA (thinking in one way), MoMA (thinking in another), or Batchen class them, and how will this article do so? -- Hoary (talk) 12:48, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Hoary. This is worth thrashing out and I'll think about how to do it. My basic answer is that categories aren't mutually exclusive. I'd want to put most of these people on the "amateur"/fine art spectrum. But let's say it's something complicated. Link is a particularly fascinating case--he seems to have only accidentally hit the nail on the head (I hope I am not selling him short, especially since I love him). But he's being taken as fine art, no matter what he intended. The confusion arises because his own case is confused, if you see what I mean. Another railroad photographer who was clearly just a workaday documentarian would not cause trouble. The way out of trouble in Link's case is to say he was a documentarian along with everything else. Was Weegee a crime photographer? Sure, why not? No one's saying he was just a crime photographer.

The case of Mike Disfarmer might help (or maybe not). Here's a guy who's pretty much your classical vernacular photographer right down the line, by those definitions that allow him to be. Except he's better than most, and not accidentally. So his own talent (along with the crucial and unusual fact that his name is attached to a coherent body of work) is putting him across the line into art, by some people's standards. But he's still a vernacular photographer by the relevant definitions. -- Imagebeau (talk) 16:14, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Imagebeau, I tend to think of Link as a celebrity portraitist (like James Abbe?) who dealt with locomotives rather than humans. But of course there has long been an industry of the photographic aggrandizement or flattery of technology and industry, and it's probably impossible to draw a clear line between documenting a phenomenon and doing PR for it (which isn't to say that classification onto one side or the other is never possible). A great amount of artistry went into Link's work ... but then we risk getting into debates over the relationship between ("mere"?) artistry and ("fine"?) art. Disfarmer, the great disflatterer -- the rediscovery almost seems to have triggered the rediscovery, decades later, of the work of quite a few other provincial or low-budget studio photographers (all of whose names now escape me).

We have art brut; I wonder if there's a term photographie brute for Miroslav Tichý and the like. If there is, that too would be unclear: I suppose that Rimaldas Vikšraitis [article merited!] would be there, but also in "art", and in "documentary" too. -- Hoary (talk) 23:30, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Hoary, I almost mentioned this fantastic show, which I saw:

https://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/photo-brut/

It did include Tichý, who was almost mainstream in this context. The phrase photo brut was more a handle than a term, really--no one insisted on it very much. It meant something like "self-taught and/or fringy photography," which is obviously made for unclear cases. They could have used the term "outsider photography," but the main collector (Bruno Decharme) is French and the whole thing came from the French-speaking world. I don't know what you think of the whole "outsider" phenomenon. It has a Romantic element (like, these people are so far out that they're pure and wonderful and we can love them without having funny feelings about it because they're free of ambition and careerism and nasty stuff like that), but I follow it carefully and it includes or has been made to include some terrific artists.

"Photo brut" is obviously related to the other non-mainstream categories I like--just a different way of chopping things up conceptually. I'm not going to worry about it just now, if that's OK, since it's not an accepted term (or idea) like the two we've been discussing. -- Imagebeau (talk) 00:51, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Imagebeau, yes, please feel free not to worry about fringy photography for now (if at all). ¶ That said: I'd never heard of the Photo brut show. If I'd been in the neighborhood I'd have wanted to see it. As it is, as I look at the page about it, the only name that's familiar aside from Tichý is Darger, and I hadn't known that he took photographs too. (And I, in Japan, am surprised to see a couple of Japanese-looking names in the list.) ¶ Please work on this article, or the one on found photography, or possibly both, in your own good time, without more back-seat driving by me. -- Hoary (talk) 03:26, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Maintenance templates

I've reverted your removal of the maintenance templates I added, Imagebeau. There are still plenty of unsourced and unattributed statements and opinions in the article, such as "The idea was ahead of its time and received little attention", "The key is its marginalized and overlooked status", "This formulation apparently excludes both professional and fine-art photography and thus resembles the Museum of Modern Art's first definition", etc. Cordless Larry (talk) 15:35, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Cordless Larry. I've addressed those points and much more. I'd like to remove the templates, but please advise. Imagebeau (talk) 13:19, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your efforts, Imagebeau. The article is certainly improved and I think it's almost ready for the templates to be removed. My one remaining concern is that you have statements such as "Current thinking about vernacular photography was anticipated as early as 1964 by John Szarkowski..." and "In 2000, the art historian Geoffrey Batchen touched off the current wave of interest...", referenced only to Szarkowski and Batchen themselves. Such statements need secondary sources, to support the claims being made about those authors (that they anticipated and touched off, etc.). Cordless Larry (talk) 14:47, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the additional references, Imagebeau. I've now removed the templates. Cordless Larry (talk) 19:11, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Cordless Larry! Imagebeau (talk) 20:03, 2 July 2021 (UTC)