Created by oook
Anthropologist, librarian, retired and now enjoying opportunities for independent scholarship. Musician, eclectic tastes and proclivities.
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I have a lot of photographs, collected over the last 30-some years in various antique and junk stores. While the main locale was Nova Scotia, several friends have contributed photos found in their travels. Making these materials into coherent presentations is an interesting challenge: they can be sorted, interpreted, guessed at, lied about, and generally turned into compelling stories. Sometimes it's possible to use available evidence for analytical purposes, and sometimes it's just for fun.
Some of my projects
- Nova Scotia Faces: the Web page
- This was the Web1.0 starting place for the project
- Nova Scotia Faces: the Wiki
- I'm exploring a Wiki presentation of the material
- The Joe Wilner page
- A fragmentary reconstruction based on a box of 200-odd snapshots.
The domain
One site notes that vernacular photography is "...one of the most affordable areas of collecting and therefore offers wonderful opportunities for the beginner to acquire beautiful examples of photographic art at very reasonable prices." gargantuaphotos.com poses the basic question: "Why would I buy someone else's crappy old photos?", and thefoundphoto.com is another gallery/vendor.
Boston University hosted Vernacular Reframed, "a two-day interdisciplinary conference examining issues in vernacular photography" in November 2004, but lots of enthusiasts are in the game as well: Square America (see their links to others), bighappyfunhouse.com, and Junior Bonner blogs about the phenomenon. Some specialize in specific genres, like photobooth and African American Vernacular Photography. Ookpik specializes in Michigan photographs, happy palace has an eclectic (and ever-growing) mix, greywater posts "photographs from films I processed that I found in old cameras...", and eBay has a Vernacular Photography Enthusiasts group with more than 100 members.
Serious scholarship is not far behind: Electronic Journal of Vernacular Photography may be stillborn, but (continued here)
Some Nova Scotia Faces
The last snap Ernest...
The Sin of Pride
Headed straight for...
Leg of Mutton and La...
Oxwhips
A Case of the Family...
Moments Preserved
On vacation
No Smile
Found links: others with similar tastes
- Photos of an unknown family who probably owned a liquor store
- added 8 Jan 2006, via BoingBoing
- Montana Sedition Project
- "Forty men and one woman went to prison for sedition in Montana..." around WW I
- Found photos
- added 8 Jan 2006, via BoingBoing
- Look at Me: a collection of found photos
- added 8 Jan 2006, via BoingBoing
- Shinesf photobooth stream
- added 11 Jan 2006, via BoingBoing
- Flickr vernacular photo pool
- a web project organized by students at Tufts University exploring vernacular photography
- ...and 'vintage' is another
- popular tag on Flickr
- The Oracle, 1928
- a college yearbook from the Beiderbecke era, lovingly scanned and annotated
- mrwaterslide's Flickr photos
- here's somebody who really knows what he's doing with these materials
- Roger Vaughan Picture Library
- Victorian and Edwardian Photographs, especially Carte de Visite and Cabinet Cards
- Is This You?
- Found photographs "from photobooths and pavements all over the UK. the isthisyou project was born out of a simple question: is it possible to reunite these images with their owners?"
- Contemporary Wet Plate Photography
- Quinn Jacobson's magnificent reinvention of the technology
- Least Wanted's mug shots
- inept lives of crime
- Jason Bitner's LaPorte Indiana
- "...studio portraits of the townspeople of LaPorte, Indiana-over 18,000 in total. Taken over three decades..."
- Jean Burgess summarizes
- with a quote from Geoffrey Batchen
PubSub vernacular/demotic photography
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