Reflections on Face Value: Curating Vernacular Photography After The Material Turn

The Material Turn 2In the past three decades, photography studies has renegotiated the relationship between the vernacular, amateur-produced image (which is often a gelatin silver snapshot) and more conceptual "art" photography.Many theorists have reinvigorated the field of photography with discussions of functional or applied photographs, from the work of anthropologists Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Pinney to Geoffrey Batchen's seminal works on the "vernacular" and Tina Campt's call for viewers to "listen" to the images we are confronted with in the archive. 1 This rise in the field's attention to the vernacular corresponds with photography's entry into the museum as a reified art object.That entry, as Douglas Crimp argued, placed both the medium and the museum in a state of crisis in the postmodern moment.In The Museum's Ruins, Crimp wrote, "[The museum and art history] are together with photography, or perhaps more precisely the repression and select use of photography, the preconditions of the discourse that we call modern art." 2 I had the opportunity to consider these questions through working with the collection of Nigel Maister, for an exhibition entitled Face Value: The Uses of Portraiture at the University of Rochester's Hartnett Gallery.I found in curating Face Value that to approach these themes within the space of the exhibition makes altogether different demands on curatorial logic and installation.In order to dissolve the categories of "art" and "vernacular" (or more precisely, functional) General exhibition view of Face Value: Conversations