Vernaculaires | Clément Chéroux
The discussion of vernacular photography has gained an unexpected place within the discussion of photography in contemporary art circles. In recent decades, artists, curators, collectors, publishers and other players in the cultural market have decided to pay attention to other possibilities for using the camera.
In this book, the initial attempt to define photography as useful, domestic and popular is replaced by “… it groups together everything that is not part of art. It is situated outside of what has so far been recognized as worthy of interest by the main instances of cultural legitimation. It develops on the periphery of what is a reference, counts or weighs within the artistic sphere.”
The breadth of this definition is already felt when you go through the book’s index and see photos of ghosts, scientific photos, photos sold at fairs, photos for documents, etc, etc. Every photographer who hasn’t thought about having their work exhibited in an art gallery is a vernacular photographer.
Of course, this includes the great mass of what we call “amateur” photographs, of families, outings, weekends, parties and occasions of which the photograph will first and foremost be a “souvenir”. In this chapter, the author makes a distinction between the expert photographer and the lay photographer(expert and usager in French). While the former has an aesthetic intention and masters the photographic technique, the latter just wants a decent record without any perfectionism in any technical or aesthetic direction.
It’s interesting reading because of the discussion points it introduces and the many curiosities it brings up. But it doesn’t go much further than the obvious. You can see that the big question underlining the whole discussion is about the possibilities of vernacular photography as a market, because it doesn’t lend itself much to criteria such as authorship, difficulty, novelty, rarity and others that help to value a work of art when it has already been born in its natural habitat.