Camilla Webster found image project
December 3, 2006
“A mass society consists of people who can only relate to each other like atoms in a physical or chemical compound. Mass society consists of atomised people, people who lack any meaningful or morally coherent relationships with each other. These people are clearly not conceived of purely and simply as isolated atoms, but the links between them are said to be purely contractual, distant and sporadic rather than close, communal and integrated”.
Re-printing other people’s snapshots has been a way for me to visually articulate how we in the industrialised nations use the camera to document everyday events in our lives. These images reveal something of the sometimes unconscious behaviour we can all adopt when holding a camera, or standing in front of one.
The initial idea for this project came from trying to sort through my grand parents’ huge number of photographic images they had accumulated over the last 65 years. These pictures were just sitting in boxes, unseen. The jumble of the imagery included photographs spanning 4 generations of the Ellingsen family, charting all kinds of personal and social familial events. There were so many pictures (both snapshots and studio photographs) that I had to begin to sort the images not by date, or ‘branch’ of family, but by subject matter. This, I believed would allow the youngest in my family to relate their lives to those of their great, great grandparents. Within the vast group of images, eventually sorted, there were clearly some photographic scenes that occurred over and over again. This intrigued me and pushed me to research into other people’s collections. Sure enough, they mirrored my family’s archive. This was especially true when looking at photographs taken over the past 15 years, with the more modern 35mm cameras, and more recently moving into digital imagery. Repetition by its very nature tends to re-enforce a point.
These seemed to be the kinds of images we all take and fit within an accepted visual language whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.
The first group of photographs that I became aware of including such repetition were those of airplane wings taken mid-flight. To me, these not only spoke of the wonder of flight for a human being (us seeing the world in a way that otherwise, without the aid of an aircraft, we would not see), but also highlighted the idea that a photographic image can be an idealistic vision and status symbol. Whoever took this photograph had the money to board a plane and travel somewhere, and more than likely was going on a holiday “abroad”.
Using the internet to source most of my imagery I was able to type in specific ‘search’ criteria such as ‘airplane wing’ or ‘airplane window’ to find image after image to match my initial finds. From the hundreds of images found, I have hand made three books. Instead of including all images in each category, and sub-category, I have chosen pairs of images to draw attention to the repetitive nature of vernacular photography. These will allude to the fact that there are more images like them out there, and hopefully within the viewer’s personal collection of everyday photographs.
My books have been split into three categories of commonplace images; (1) Clichés in family photography, (2) Clichés in travel photography and (3) Clichés in celebratory photography. These images may not be the kinds of images you would see in a family photo album, for instance, but they are all on display in the public domain. The displaying of familial imagery denotes a willingness to let people in on certain aspects of your life. The photographer is the editor, and these people’s home pages are edited versions of their lives.
Additional to the books, I have created an interactive web page. Interactive to the point that anybody who enters my site will be able to add their own images to the groups of vernacular images by emailing them to me. People sending images in may even inspire new groups of images to be created.
This project is based on the use of found vernacular imagery and questions the role of the artist, as the authorship and original work used lie physically with another party. The idea was to attempt to order and archive this mass of imagery, dislocating images from their original context and putting them in a gallery space to be seen with a new perspective.
“Photography is like a found object. A Photographer never makes an actual subject they just steal the image from the world”
