When I went up to see Alex Turner last weekend, I wasn’t sure where Marshall Gallery was in Bergamont Station, and I wandered into The Green Bus Artspace to ask for directions. It was absolutely appropriate since their current exhibition is Lost and Found. I noticed what was on the walls as I was getting directions and I promised to come back after Alex’s talk, which I did.

I really like Vernacular photography; those types of photographs can be wonderful documents of the past and I respect the power of images to help preserving our memories. With vernacular photographs we often don’t have any more information about the photograph than the image itself, so the viewer has to interpret the photograph for themselves. Most of these photographs can always tell us something about the period and the place but that might be it. People photograph to document their world and preserve things that are important to them, in a photobooth the strip of images might only matter to the people behind the curtain.

When I see vernacular images, I often think back to a lecture Bill Jay gave at Arizona State University when I was there and it highlighted how the value of an image is determined by the viewer. I have mentioned the lesson several times before on this blog and it always has value to revisit it. The last time I shared it was a year ago when my daughter’s best friend died unexpectedly shortly after arriving in Paris to watch her sister-in-law compete in the Olympics. With that mention I wrote about how photographs of her friend were a way for us to hold on to her memory. It is an obvious connection. When I see vernacular photographs the prints are outlasting the memory of the people in the images. These prints were most likely unwanted and were discarded, maybe they were lost in either case the prints could be very much like the people in the photographs.

This exhibition might seem lighthearted and fun at first, I chuckled at some images, but I think there are lots of layers here. I think they absolutely crushed it, if you are near Santa Monica, it is absolutely worth the stop. The presentation and curation of the images is perfect, it absolutely fits their space, and the creative way the images were enlarged and displayed is outstanding. Without the scale and display techniques this exhibition would not have been as good.

Bill Jay Lesson from previous posts:

I know I have told this story more than once, but it’s worth repeating and still is one of the greatest things Bill Jay taught us while I was at Arizona State University. We were in class one day, in Matthews Hall, when Bill put two slides up the screen next to one another (yes back then you looked at prints or slides in class and there were real blackboards). One image was Ansel Adams’s Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico which had just set the record for the most expensive print ever sold (I think it sold for around $40K). In the other projector Bill put up a good snapshot quality photo of a child in an inflatable wading pool. I can’t recall but it may have even been a photograph of one of his daughters, doesn’t matter. So, with both images side by side he asked the class which photograph was more valuable. Lots of my classmates spoke up with reason why it was Adams’s photograph; because of composition, because of the author, and many noted how important the sale was for the medium in general because of the price it sold for. After everyone willing to take the bait had their say, then Bill gave us more information. He said what if this print is the only photograph that this mother has which documents her child at that time in their lives. Maybe all the family albums had been lost in a fire, maybe she had even lost the child, and that simple snapshot was the only visual reminder she had of her child. He then asked us which print would the mother say is more valuable? Would she even consider selling the simple photograph of the child for any price? That simple example was almost forty years ago, and it is still so vivid to me. The viewer sets the value based on their own experiences and tastes.