photography

Some everyday cosmopolitanism at a project called normal room.

Normal Room shows you interior design and home furniture from all around the globe. Search our image database and explore the differences and similarities in architecture and home decoration between people in different countries.

via boing boing.

I’ve just caught up with the 2006 Australian Snapshots exhibition:

The Australian Snapshots initiative began in August 2004, when 150 disposable cameras were sent to Local Radio listeners across regional Australia with a request to photograph sports, leisure and daily activities that connected their communities.

The rationale behind using disposable cameras was to create an equal playing field for all – no-one could crop, filter or manipulate their photos to achieve more dramatic results. I

There’s a weird politics of Australianness that reflects the idea that regional and rural Australia are the locus of genteel, folksy creativity (as opposed to the rawness or digital sophistication of urban Australia) but I like the imposition of technological constraints by using disposable film cameras a _lot_. And I love this year’s theme of course:

We’re hoping to once again capture the essence of life in Australia – this time through the variety of creative endeavours undertaken in regional Australia.

This could vary from hobbies and leisure activities like art, theatre groups, craft, cooking etc, to unique work environments – gardens, nurseries, teaching, fund raising etc. How you interpret the theme is up to you

If you get the chance, use your photos to tell us a story of your chosen creative pursuit.

And of course, there are quilts. Woo!

I’ve just uploaded some of the images from my very first rolls of medium format film, which I butchered in a Holga ‘toy’ camera and a Lubitel (a bit less of a toy, but still plastic). I shot off the first few rolls pretty much just as I wandered around the house. I love the sometimes beautiful mistakes (double exposures, lack of focus), the risk involved with choosing settings and then pressing the shutter when you don’t know an F stop from a bus stop, and the anxious wait to see what (if anything) the images look like when you get them back from the lab. There’s just something about all of it that I can’t help but be seduced by.

And, yes, to all those who have heard my several rants about how much I’m irritated by ‘the recuperation of the banality of everyday life as both extraordinary and resistant through knowing tactics of aestheticisation’ etcetera, I am definitely reviewing my former holier-than-thou attitude towards the practice, if not the institutionalised wankery, of ‘lomography’. After all, it’s just so fun and easy and, well, pretty.

Geoffrey Batchen defines vernacular photography like this:

The term ‘vernacular’ literally means the ordinary and ubiquitous but it also refers to qualities specific to particular regions or cultures. Its attachment to the word ‘photography’ allows historians like myself to argue for the need to devise a way of representing photography’s history that can incorporate all its many manifestations and functions. A vernacular history of photography will have to be able to deal with the kind of hybrid objects I describe above, but also with, for example, photographies from outside Europe and the U.S. It may mean having to adopt non-traditional voices and narrative structures. It will certainly mean abandoning art history’s evaluation system (based on masterpieces and masters, originality and innovation, and so on). In short, the term ‘vernacular photography’ is intended as a provocation and a challenge.

There’s also this post on the subject from juniorbonner.

A lot of the time the term ‘vernacular photography’ also seems to be synonymous with ‘found‘ photographs – particularly old, faded, crumpled photographs found lost or abandoned in a shoebox at a garage sale – someone else’s memories, with their technical and aesthetic ‘flaws’ left bare, their subjects left unidentified, and their narratives subject to the inventions of imaginative or curious viewers.