ern American Civilization(1948), John A. Kouwen-
hoven offers this succinct definition of the vernacular
style: ‘‘the unself-conscious efforts of common peo-
ple...to create satisfying patterns out of the elements
of a new and culturally unassimilated environment’’
(Kouwenhoven 1948, 13). Kouwenhoven’s vernacu-
lar is democratic, utilitarian, and quotidian. It resists
tradition, looking instead to the practical conditions
of the modern world, and yet it creates new habits
that fall neatly into daily routines and establish reso-
nant cultural meanings. Thus, the term vernacular
itself emphasizes the lessons of practical experience
as a defining characteristic over the more superficial
concerns of style and authorship. Within the context
of photographic production and consumption, the
vernacular suggests the organic formation of a prac-
tical, utilitarian culture around new visual technolo-
gies. The scope of this practical engagement with
photography is vast. Comprising images as diverse
as picture postcards, snapshots, daguerreotype por-
traits, and scrap-booked newspaper clippings, the
category of vernacular photography draws from a
variety of photographic images and objects, made by
both professionals and amateurs, in a variety of
different styles and genres. But it also unites these
disparate elements in their function to negotiate in-
dividual needs and desires within the private (often
domestic) sphere.
Because vernacular photography is comprised
almost exclusively of photographs in private con-
texts, once defined, this large body of photographic
material proves resistant to comprehensive analysis.
Within the academy, vernacular photography has
historically been dismissed as heterogeneous, indi-
vidual, and sentimental, at once difficult to define
properly and too incidental to merit real scrutiny.
What has been written on the subject employs a
variety of different strategies to understand various
facets of this ubiquitous but somewhat impene-
trable genre. Richard Chalfen’sSnapshot Versions
of Life(1987), for example, takes an anthropologi-
cal tack, using field research and statistics to
describe photographic practices ‘‘in the home
mode.’’ Nancy Martha West’sKodak and the Lens
of Nostalgia(2000) takes a Marxist cultural studies
approach, reading photography through the com-
modity culture of Kodak and exploring the ways
that commerce has shaped our everyday relations to
photography and nostalgia. Marianne Hirsch’s
Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Post-
memory(1997) and the essays compiled in Jo Spence
and Patricia Holland’s anthologyFamily Snaps:
The Meaning of Domestic Photography(1991) stitch
together art history, social history, critical theory,
and autobiographical accounts of the authors’ own
personal relationships to photography to suggest
broader cultural currents in our psychological at-
tachment to vernacular images. But each of these
authors also acknowledges the inherently difficult
nature of their project. At once highly individualis-
tic and thoroughly homogeneous, deeply personal
and culturally constructed, vernacular photogra-
phy is inherently paradoxical. And because of its
slippery public/private nature, it eludes any single
methodological approach.
Of the two competing halves of vernacular photo-
graphy’s paradoxical nature the more overt centers
on the democratic nature of vernacular practice.
Vernacular photography is coded as the instinctual
and untrained photographic actions of everyday peo-
ple. Available to anyone who would pick up a cam-
era and free from complex and ossified cultural
traditions, the vernacular is seen to be a truly egali-
tarian form of visual culture, springing fully formed
from vital, experiential concerns with contemporary
life. To be truly democratic, vernacular photography
requires that both the means of technological pro-
duction and the visual rhetoric of the image be uni-
versally accessible. On this first point, as discussed
below, Kodak has, since 1900, marketed cameras so
simple and inexpensive that even a child could oper-
ate them. As to the egalitarian visual rhetoric of the
vernacular image, vernacular photography seems to
elude visual hierarchies of taste and aesthetic quality
by operating on the guiding principle of an emo-
tional over an intellectual response to the image. As
numerous theorists of vernacular photography have
noted, the personal photograph seems to tap into
some essential desire for and affective attachment
to the image of another human being. This sentimen-
tal weight of the vernacular photograph is at once
the reason for its marginalized presence within scho-
larly histories, and its most fascinating and under-
analyzed feature. The highly subjective and illogical
nature of photographic affect is difficult to codify
(and to many scholars, not worth the effort), yet
affective forces are central to the way vernacular
photographs are created and consumed. Within the
quotidian framework, photography is often simple
and straightforward, placing legibility over style, aes-
thetic, or precision. Vernacular photography is the
ideal example of what Roland Barthes described in
Camera Lucida(1982) as the invisible or tautological
nature of the photograph. The vernacular photo-
graph provides a literal conduit to the referent and
as such, carries with it the sentimental specificity of
that referent. This naı ̈ve relationship to the photo-
graphic image imprints documentary visual histories,
family portraits, and photographic souvenirs and
mementos with the arresting presence of a distantVERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY