Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography began as a two-day symposium convened at Columbia University in October 2018, organized by the Walther Collection with Barnard’s Center for Research on Women and the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The book that followed, published in 2020 by Steidl with the Walther Collection and edited by Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis, carries that conversation onto the page.
Its subject is the vast archive of photographs made for use rather than for art: snapshots and family pictures, albums and displays, mug shots and identification portraits, and ethnographic, scientific, industrial, and architectural images. The essays define vernacular photography by social function rather than aesthetic quality, then ask what these ordinary pictures reveal about social patterns, personal ritual, and the ways people reinforce or resist structures of identity and political participation. The contributors examine how power and ideology, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality shape such images, and they reconsider the agency of the people who made, compiled, and viewed them. The writing also attends to affect, touch, and sound as forces in how these photographs work.
The volume’s four sections move from the limits and possibilities of the field to troubling portraiture and the shadow archive, then to performance and transformation, and finally to space, materiality, and the social worlds of the photograph. Case studies range widely, among them identification portraits of California migrant workers, physique photographs circulated underground in queer communities, and commemorative military albums made in Louisiana and Vietnam. Such material formats and shared communities are treated together, so the book reads as an argument rather than a survey.
For a serious collector, the book’s value lies in the arguments it assembles and the questions it reopens. By inserting ordinary photographs and long-ignored objects into existing histories of photography, it recasts those narratives from within. At 432 pages, with essays by a broad field of scholars and critics, it functions as a reference point for anyone thinking about the social life of photographs.
