'Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography' surveys the expansive field of vernacular photography, the vast archive of utilitarian images created for bureaucratic structures, commercial usage and personal commemoration, as opposed to elite aesthetic purposes. As a crucial extension of its ongoing investigation of vernacular photography, The Walther Collection has collaborated with key scholars and critical thinkers in the history of photography, women's studies, queer theory, Africana studies and curatorial practice to interrogate vernacular's theoretical limits, as well as to conduct case studies of a striking array of objects and images, many from the collection's holdings. From identification portraits of California migrant workers, physique photographs that circulated underground in queer communities, to one-of-a-kind commemorative military albums from Louisiana to Vietnam, these richly illustrated essays treat a breadth of material formats, social uses and shared communities, offering new ways to consider photography in relation to our political affiliations, personal agency and daily rituals. By reconsidering the multiple contexts and meanings of often-overlooked photographic practices, 'Imagining Everyday Life' is a groundbreaking contribution articulating the vital debates and complexities within an energizing new field. Co-published with The Walther Collection, New York.
Foreword / Artur Walther -- Introduction / Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis -- Why vernacular photography? The limits and possibilities of a field / Brian Wallis -- Introducing Werner Kühler / Clément Chéroux -- Whither the vernacular? / Geoffrey Batchen -- Photographs on the edge of history : genre, time, and conquest in Southern Africa / Patricia Hayes -- Market transactions cannot abolish decades of plunder / Ariella Azoulay -- Discussion -- Plates 1-26 -- Troubling portraiture : photographic portraits and the Shadow Archive / Tina M. Campt -- Troubling portraiture : photographic portraits and the Carceral Archive / Nicole R. Fleetwood -- Capture and captivation : identifying migrancy and the making of non-citizens / Lily Cho -- On vernacular portrait photography in Iran / Ali Behdad -- To burst asunder : endurance and the event of photography / Laura Wexler -- Discussion -- Plates 27-47 -- Performance and transformation : photographic (re)visions of subjectivity / Gil Hochberg -- Occupational portraits and escape artists / Shawn Michelle Smith -- Bobbie in context / Sophie Hackett -- It's raining men : physique photography and racial capitalism / Elspeth H. Brown -- Soldiers and Black beauty queens : making home abroad in the Miss Black America Album / Leigh Raiford -- Discussion -- Plates 48-64 -- Space, materiality, and the social worlds of the photograph / Marianne Hirsch -- Polaroids and loss / Drew Thompson -- Intimate estrangements and the shape of family / Thy Phu -- "Speaking of Pictures" : shaping and creating narratives in the African American family album / Deborah Willis -- The extraordinary ordinary : reflections on the vernacular photography / Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett -- Discussion -- Plates 65-82 -- Destruction and transformation in the built environment / Brian Wallis -- Plates 83-103.
Vernacular photography--United States--Pictorial works