Meandering though the rich territory of the vernacular photograph …

 

 

 

It is my distinct impression that amateur photographs and the digital age aren’t a great mix. In terms of quantity, there’s no doubt it’s a mix; there are probably more so-called vernacular photos on the Web than there are drops of water in a suspended second of Niagara Falls. But where are those images that last? Instead, it seems like there is a great need from most collectors of images to post the novel, the strange, and the weird. After a momentary surprise, the pictures fade from memory.

In the long ago days of paleolithic photography there was the snapshot mostly moldering away in family albums. But in leafing through those albums (strangely,rarely one’s own) one would come across a fair number that might take your breath away - there was  quality of pathos in many of those moments stopped forever. It was what Susan Sontag referred to when she said, what renders a photograph surreal  is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past. Maybe those messages from Internet are too close to our present time; they haven’t yet acquired the patina of the past. As long as we have our oracle, Ms. Sontag, on deck, she also said The greatest art seems secreted, not constructed. Maybe the problem I have with digital images on the Internet is they seem constructed as opposed to being secreted. 

 

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And yet one has to admit one thing about the flood of pictures on the internet: they reveal a deep hunger for photographic images. How else to explain the numerous blogs which simply present a catalog of images, unmediated, one after the other, without captions, without context: as long as it is a photograph of something it gets on there. So maybe my search for quality is beside the point: the omnivorous hunger for images is the point. It could be that hunger has always been there: the famished mesmerized by images. It is perhaps telling that the survivors of Katrina when they returned to their ruined and bedraggled homes the first thing they looked for was their collection of family photos. But now with the internet, proof of identity and place, are all out there, on FaceBook, on Flickr, on MySpace, YourSpace, OurSpace,  on thousands of sites. Instead of just the family sharing the intimate space of the their album now the family album is in outer space.  

 

In the early 80s when I was doing a teaching stint at the University of Texas in San Antonio I had a student who worked at Fox Photo, an enormous photo-processing mill that ate thousands of rolls of film an hour, spewing out an Amazon of images, if not the Niagara of the Internet. I satisfied my own hunger for images by having this student bring me back a few droplets in a paper bag every day - maybe two or three hundred photographs, mostly color - even by then black-and-white was a scarcity in the amateur world. In every bag there were probably a dozen or so that would stop you in your tracks. I was thinking back on those days when I came across a web site www.squareamerica.com that has a collection of African-American images, mostly from the 50s. The selections on this post were found on that site. 

   Almost every image tolls that bell of pathos, that glimpse of a life so tantalizing with its unanswered questions.  Here are two more, but if you go to that website you’ll see dozens more as  good. All the selections are a testimony to the keen eye of the collector on that website , Nicholas Osborne.

 

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Look at this magnificent face, slipping away into the mists of time even as we look at it. All the accumulated quotidian moments of  life gone except for this one fading moment in a photo booth. Not even his name, his most precious possession. remains. The only reality left is the surface of the paper and even that threatens to vanish. A true American ruin.

 

 

Another from the African-American archive:  This one reminds me of those poignant grave markers in Roman Catholic cemeteries in Europe where the custom is to place ceramic photographs of the deceased on the gravestones. Both the bodies beneath the stones and their representations above seem to disintegrate in tandem until only the worn names on the stones give  any hint of a life once led. 

Which in turn reminds me of a series done by my friend George Krause, a mammoth documentation of the gravestones of Italy, Spain and Mexico. I say ‘mammoth’ not because they are elephantine but because it is an immense collection, consisting of hundreds, possibly thousands, of image garnered over thirty years or more, in a series he calls Qui Riposa. You can see  more on his website, www.georgekrause.com  Here are two:

 

George Krause, Qui Riposa

George Krause Qui Riposa

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But not to get too carried away  - in those bags of  Texan images most were forgettable pictures, badly seen, hardly felt, unremarkable glimpses of perhaps remarkable lives.   But the few that did draw you in were worth the hours of tiresome winnowing.

Nevertheless, after about a month I could take it no more. No more bags, I pleaded. My student collaborator seemed quite relieved, especially as his supervisor at Fox was giving him suspicious looks, convinced he was tapping into a rich black market of  purloined snapshots.

Apparently Fox Photo, once 450 stores strong, was swallowed up by a larger predator, Wolf Photo some years ago, and now seems to be part of an even larger conglomerate, Ritz Photo. Somewhere in these acquisitions was the yellow hand of an even larger company, Kodak. I hope its demise wasn’t due to employee pilfering. As Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying: and so it goes.   


Here’s  one from the ‘net I did like: an anonymous cellphone picture: