CLUES, NOT DATA

By MICHAEL PERKINS

LONG BEFORE I HEARD THE LOFTY TERM VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY, I collected examples of it. That is, I occasionally bought snapshots from junk stores taken by people I never met, typically without context or notations, their story-telling power limited to whatever actually made it into the picture. Unlike the museum curators and heavy thinkers, however, I didn’t make a distinction between “photos” and “art photography”, and so I never saw the images of anonymous or amateur shooters as “different from” or less than any other kind of picture. Offering no data but only clues, these snaps often spoke to me more clearly than so-called “professional work”.

Let us look upon an example.

The little girls seen here were captured by an unknown photographer somewhere in southern Ohio in the late 1930’s. The print quality and tonal range suggest a professional portrait artist. The image appears to be an intentional group portrait of a kind of kiddie percussion orchestra, equipped with xylophones, trap drums, and triangles, the girls turned out in full costume. The image was likely replicated thousands of times across the country with millions more children at the forward edge of their lives. Without knowing their names or what may have occurred in their lives afterward, without a word of background detail, we can practically feel their innocence, their hope, the way they saw themselves and, in turn, were seen in the first third of the American Twentieth Century.

Ahead. at least for some, lay another World War, marriages, children of their own, random triumphs and tragedies, and the scattering to the winds of lives that are, for this one instant, wound tightly around each other. There is so much we will never be told by this image, but, regardless of his or her anonymity, the photographer has here rendered a document that can teach us volumes about ourselves as humans, and thus must be a work of art, whether or not it ever hangs in a gallery or inspires lofty monographs by curators. To look into these girls’ faces is to look into every child’s face, and that transmission of immortality frees us from time, conveying something universal, eternal. It expresses the spectacular in the vernacular.