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Exhibition Reviews
| "African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection." International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036.
Temporary exhibition, Dec. 9, 2005–Feb. 26, 2006. 765 sq. ft. Brian Wallis, curator.
African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection. By Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis (New York: International Center of Photography, 2005. 128 pp. Cloth, $25.00, ISBN 3-86521-225-5.)
Internet: brief description of exhibition, photographs, museum information, online store, http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.1288081/k.85A7/Daniel_Cowin.htm.
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| In "African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection," the International Center of Photography (ICP) presented selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection of African American History, a gift of approximately sixteen hundred photographs, which the center acquired in 1990. Among the sixty-six works displayed in the small exhibition space were commercial studio portraits of black slaves, performers, and community leaders; snapshots of African Americans at home and play; stereocards depicting racist humor and touristic views of southern life; and photographic documents of education reform in black communities. According to Chief Curator Brian Wallis, those pictures speak to the range of African American experiences between 1860 and 1940 as they were captured by black and white photographers. While the exhibition offered an art-museum public an important and rare look at this range of experiences and images, its account of photography in African American history overstated both the "ordinary" quality of that genre and the agency that its subjects acquired in front of the camera's lens. |
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The ICP represented the show as "the first major exhibition" of vernacular photographs depicting black life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even though one could confer that title onto exhibitions held by several of the museum's neighbors, including the New-York Historical Society and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, as well as to "Reflections in Black," an influential survey organized by Deborah Willis of black photographers that traveled throughout the United States in 2000. The ICP itself had previously displayed African Americans studio portraits, family pictures, and social documentary photographs in shows that highlighted its permanent collection or focused on the work of individual photographers, such as Augustus Washington and James VanDerZee. What differentiated the new show from those earlier exhibitions was its (albeit preliminary) investigation of the specificity and limits of the term "vernacular" to define the photographs on display. |
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In the beautifully illustrated exhibition catalog, African American Vernacular Photography, Wallis variously describes vernacular photographs as "everyday," and "banal," yet highly "conventional" (pp. 9, 13). Taken by the "most ordinary" studio operators and amateur snap-shooters, he explains, these pictures were often viewed in private albums or with parlor stereoscopes (p. 9). Wallis further distinguishes vernacular photographs by their "utter lack of interest in photography's fine art status.... they belie no apparent aesthetic ambition other than to record what passes in front of the camera with reasonable fidelity" (ibid.). The "vernacular" therefore operates in dialectical opposition to self-consciously "artistic" photography enshrined within canonical art histories of the medium. By defining the vernacular in that way, as many historians have done, Wallis proposes an "other" history of photography and, indeed, a wholly "other" photography whose value is bound not to (white, elite) aesthetics, but to its historical context and social use, whether that be to satirize, enslave, advertise, uplift, or celebrate. The object labels in the exhibition therefore spoke less about the artistic qualities of the photographs than they did about the history of the photographers and studios that produced them, the individuals and social types depicted, and the broad social environment in which the images circulated. The label for a cabinet card of an unidentified woman in formal dress (c. 1910), for instance, commented on the commercial success of Benjamin W. Fowler, whose studio took the portrait, the black sitter's likely position among Philadelphia's literary elite, the activities of that racially mixed group, and the city's contributions to abolitionist activities. |
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