“Vernacular photography”

Usually I think terminology doesn’t matter very much. Terminology is just the names for stuff, whereas what we’re interested in is the stuff. But terminology can be revealing. It embodies current thinking about the stuff. For example, the invention of a term for something within a larger category tells us where the inventor locates the point of interest. Once a term is on the map, it may change or be lost entirely when it no longer seems appropriate. This happens all the time in scientific terminology: science notices something and invents a name for it, but later changes its mind about what it is and then has to rename it. Take the term “junk DNA.” It seemed apt at first, but geneticists gradually saw that what they had been calling junk DNA wasn’t junk at all. It has all sorts of biological functions, even if it doesn’t code for proteins. Bit by bit, the more accurate term “non-coding DNA” has taken hold instead. In non-scientific fields, terminology has less incentive to self-correct and doesn’t always try to correspond to reality in the first place. It can even wag the dog: no matter if it’s wrong or misguided or was introduced for bad reasons, it can actually influence people’s thinking about the primary material, molding or even effectively creating what’s of interest in the larger category. One example might be the marketing term “world music.” This completely artificial, profoundly Western-centric category is actually a gigantic grab bag containing all but a tiny bit of the world’s music. The term misleads listeners in the target audience: it has no musical meaning at all apart from suggesting a spurious exoticism and “authenticity.” Those same expectations then confine the artists and get in the way of the music. Terminology can be dangerous. So: a bit more about the term “vernacular photography.” There’s been some renewed controversy about it lately, and overall I’d say its hold is weakening a bit. I hate the term myself and never use it, for all sorts of reasons. But I have a new idea about what to do with it. The term was first devised because it seemed to meet a need: academics and curators had changed their minds about what was important in the material. No longer were snapshots photographic objets trouvés given whatever value they had by their finders; now they were records of what people did with snapshot cameras. To a certain extent that’s sensible, isn’t it? Snapshots really did function in real people’s lives, and we don’t want to lose sight of that. If we like defaced or written-on photos, for example, what’s caught our attention is something real people did to them. But snapshot collectors also want to be able to enjoy looking at pictures. The problem for us is that the snapshots displayed in museums under the name “vernacular photography” (and that’s all museum snapshots nowadays) don’t bear looking at. Modern museum snapshots aren’t meant to be looked at, really; as I say, they’re just examples taken from the field, like bugs or pottery shards, and, very much like entomological or archaeological specimens, they’re categorized and placed under glass as if that was all that needed to be done. The taxonomy is primitive—“hula gals,” “birthday cakes,” and so on—but that’s the only conceivable point. In the absence of anything aesthetically pleasurable or challenging, the approach can only be called academic, a sort of rudimentary snapshotology. Here’s some of what I disliked and continue to dislike about the term. (1) “Vernacular photography” is modeled after the existing terms “vernacular architecture” and “vernacular music,” but it’s a false analogy: unlike the people who built the buildings and played the music, the people who took the pictures were in no sense artists. (2) “Vernacular photography” leaves the collector’s eye out of consideration entirely; it’s tightly focused on the snapshooters and their world. (3) The term is of course too pretentious to say without irony. The term “vernacular photography” was invented in the year 2000 by Geoffrey Batchen, an academic historian of photography. Batchen has recently washed his hands of his coinage, and the other academics who originally accepted it may or may not continue to follow his lead and reject it. But I don’t think curators can turn back now. The fact is that the term applies beautifully to museum snapshots. Museums are still allowing viewers to think that the snapshooters were humble artists; they do not allow the collector’s eye to play a role. And museum snapshots are terribly pretentious in that they hope somehow to make up in intellectual consequence for what they lack in aesthetic interest. The reason the term and the material are such a good fit is that, as I’ve said, the term was designed to suggest precisely this angle on the larger category; and now the museum specimens are being chosen to suit the term. Neither the term nor what it applies to has anything to do with the activity of real snapshot collectors, and I no longer have any expectation or hope that what real snapshot collectors do will ever be represented in museums. My proposal is that, rather than abolishing or replacing the term “vernacular photography” as some collectors and non-curatorial cognoscenti want to do, we keep it, but reserve it for museum snapshots as we now know them. The two are essentially tailored for each other, and it’s a match made in heaven. “Vernacular photography” would then be understood to mean “(examples of) ‘vernacular photography,’ the conceptual category used by museum curators.” I have nothing against hula gals, by the way. Here’s one that’s too extraordinary to be used as vernacular photography.

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