Vernacular Photography:

‘is the creation of photographs, usually by amateur or unknown photographers both professional and amateur,who take everyday life and common things as subjects.’

Though the more commonly known definition of the word ‘vernacular’ is a quality of being ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’, the use of the word in relation to art and architecture refers more to the meaning of the following sub – definition form The Oxford English Dictionary ‘ concerned with ordinary domestic and functional buildings rather than the essentially monumental’. Examples of vernacular photographs include travel and holiday photographs as well as family snapshots, photos of friends, class portraits, identification photographs and photo booth images. Vernacular photographs are types of ‘accidental’ art, in that they often are unintentionally artistic.  Closely related to vernacular photography is ‘found photography’, which in one sense refers to the recovery of a ‘lost, unclaimed or discarded’ vernacular photograph or snapshot. Found photographs can be found in various different places such as charity shops, markets, car boot sales, in the bin, between the pages of random books or even on the side of a street. The use of vernacular photography in the arts in almost as old as photography itself, as back to when photography was just becoming a known thing and when it got to the point where a lot of people were taking photographs, almost all photographs were taken by strangers and people who we will never get to know, but somehow their photograph could have been seen by thousands of people. Vernacular photography has become far more commonplace in recent years as an art technique and it now a widely accepted genre of art photography. The idea of vernacular in photography is also an indication of photography as a medium informing the everyday, prevalent, naturalised. Something interesting about this type of photography is that it can be seen and understood as an oppositional photography, as it is outside of all the technical or artistic histories, yet, especially with the snapshot, it could also be entirely conventionalised, a manifestation of visual banalities, This relates to the theme of truth in the way that we might understand the images may or may not be separate from their initial intents.