LOOK AT ME, A COLLECTION OF FOUND PHOTOS

A friend sent me this link to a great vernacular photography website.

http://www.moderna.org/lookatme/

Other People's Pictures in NYC & on Doc Channel

We're happy to announce that Other People's Pictures will be broadcast on the Documentary Channel in May. For more details, go to the Documentary Channel's website. http://www.documentarychannel.com/main/index_new.php

Also, the film will be screened in New York City at the Jefferson Market branch of the NYC Public Library, as part of their Monday night screening series. This screening will happen on Monday, May 12th at 6:00 PM.
http://www.nypl.org/branch/local/man/jmr.cfm

NYC-based snapshot devotees may also be interested in a talk that is happening at the Jefferson Market library on the following Saturday, May 17th, at 2:00 PM. Nakki Goranin will discuss her new book, American Photobooth. http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/winter08/033076.htm

Please tell your friends.

A NEW BOOK...

Näkki Goranin

American Photobooth

Foreword by David Haberstich

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

A fascinating history of an American institution that includes an extraordinary collection of photobooth images.

“That a perceptive, dedicated, and sensitive artist like Näkki Goranin has rescued from oblivion so many amazing self-portraits created by amateurs confronting themselves in the fleeting privacy of humble photobooths is yet another miracle for which we can be grateful.”—from the foreword by David Haberstich

Generally relegated to the realm of kitsch, the history and cultural importance of the photobooth has long been overlooked. Here, Näkki Goranin documents the invention, technological evolution, and commercial history of the photobooth with extensive illustrations culled from twenty-five years of collecting. Complementing this history is a powerful collection of heartbreaking, funny, and absolutely beautiful photobooth images. These often solitary figures—seeking freedom, confession, a thrill—are evocative of a lost time and place. Haberstich writes, “For anyone who assumes that photobooth pictures are perfunctory, utilitarian records at best, the range of emotions and moods portrayed by the subjects of [this] collection is a revelation.”

BLOGS THAT I'VE STUMBLED ONTO...

While searching through Google and other search engines in search of related vernacular site, dealers and bloggers and stumbled across these listed below.

To check our other blogs that we have listed previously, browse through our previous posts.

These are new ones we came across and feel that there worth giving a look at, and if anyone has any further suggestions or additional blogs, please feel free to post them.

Thanks and enjoy

Blogs:
Vernacular Photography

(http://www.squidoo.com/vernacularphoto)

Random Camera Blog (http://randomphoto.blogspot.com/2007/09/vernacular-photography.html)

I SHOOT FILM

Ephemera

(http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/2008/04/vernacular-phot.html)

Lost and Found Photos.com

(http://photosdie.typepad.com/lostandfoundblog/

Lost and Found Photos

(http://photosdie.typepad.com/)

Swapatorium: A Journey Through Junkland

(http://swapatorium.typepad.com/)

Vernacular Photography Enthusiast (http://www.squidoo.com/VernacularPhotography)

Other People's Pictures

Article on NPR.ORG: All things considered. (June 2004)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1964382

At New York's Chelsea Flea Market, collectors sort through boxes and albums full of discarded snapshots: a black-and-white photo of a yawning girl, a Polaroid of a couple embracing at the kitchen table, a yellowed print of a group of Nazis smiling in the snow. Kaleidoscopic slices of life, these abandoned photos can sometimes bring in hundreds of dollars a piece.

Other People's Pictures, a new documentary from filmmakers Lorca Shepperd and Cabot Philbrick, examines the lives and minds of nine people who collect these lost and discarded photographs. One man searches only for "male affection" snapshots of men embracing or holding hands. Another looks for pictures that simply tell an unfinished story. An Israeli immigrant who lost family members in the Holocaust and whose own family album was destroyed years ago, owns what he calls a "banality of evil" collection: photos of Nazis in everyday situations.

NPR's Andrea Seabrook speaks to Shepperd and Philbrick about their film and the people obsessed with the snapshots of strangers.

76 Kisses

76 Kisses at the City Reliquary Museum & Civic Organization
Snapshots from the collection of Lori Becker and David E. Brown
February 1 - March 30

http://cityreliquary.org/news/archives/000473.shtml

The City Reliquary presents a Valentine of Kisses

A soldier’s parting kiss, a summer kiss at a picnic, a midnight kiss on New Year’s Eve, a lusty kiss not meant to be seen. Luckily, a camera was present to capture all of them.

76 KISSES, an exhibition of snapshots at The City Reliquary, presents an intimate and compelling look at the kiss. Just in time for Valentine’s Day!

The carefully selected vintage photographs comprise a catalog of the kiss. Each photo captures some essential quality of love and affection—the unguarded moment when two people, overcome with emotion, find their lips meeting another’s.

The photos span a full century, from a risqué and intimate smooch in a Victorian parlor to a 1990s Polaroid of a New York couple at a dance, with its super-saturated color and long embrace the very opposite of the 19th century image. The core of the collection are snapshots from the 1930s through the 1960s, widely considered the Golden Age of the American snapshot. 76 KISSES showcases the inventive, intuitive, and surprising explosion of creativity that small cameras and fast film brought.

The photographs in 76 KISSES come from Lori Baker and David E. Brown’s collection of more than 200 vintage snapshots of kisses. They have been culled from flea markets, junk shops, photo albums, yard sales, eBay, and chance finds. Baker and Brown estimate that they have looked at approximately 800,000 photographs in the search of these pictures.

Vernacular photography–that is, snapshots–has become the newest and most democratic frontier of photography collecting. Thousands of people have found art, beauty, and meaning amid billions of discarded snapshots. Vernacular photographs have been the subject of several major exhibitions, including the National Gallery’s “The Art of the American Snapshot” (opening at the Amon Carter Museum on February 16), Thomas Walther’s “Other Pictures” at the Metropolitan Museum, and “Snapshots” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Snapshots and their collectors have been the subject of an award-winning documentary (Other People’s Pictures) and created numerous books, including Babette Hines’s Photobooth and Mark Michaelson’s Least Wanted.

76 KISSES is on view at the City Reliquary from February 1 to March 31, 2008. The opening reception is Friday, February 8, from 7 to 9 pm. The City Reliquary is open Saturdays and Sundays from 12 pm to 6 pm and by appointment.

Now is Then

NOW IS THEN at the Newark Museum
Snapshots from the Maresca Collection
February 13 - May 11, 2008

http://www.newarkmuseum.org/

View vintage images from America’s golden age of snapshot photography.
From early portraits to contemporary voyeurism, the 150 works in this exciting exhibition chart the evolution of snapshot art and form an extraordinary document of American life in the first half of the 20th century.