Vernacular Photos from the Collection of John and Teenuh Foster

John and Teenuh Foster have been art collectors for over 35 years. Initially drawn to ceramic art, their attention quickly turned to self-taught/outsider art, building a respected collection of art brut masters that has been shown in numerous museums. The collection includes works by such self-taught photographers as Lee Godie, Eugene von Bruenchenhein, Vivian Maier, and others who used the medium for self-expression. Seeing a connection to self-taught art, the Fosters began collecting found, anonymous, vernacular photography in 2005, looking at and recontextualizing photographs not originally intended to be art. This included snapshots, press photos, science photographs, police mugshots, and other imagery, such as the eight vintage photographs on view in True Likeness.

Shot by amateur photographers, these photos tell a different kind of story than many of the other portraits included in this exhibition. The subjects are likely to be friends or family members of the photographer. Even when posed, they represent a more casual moment and are quite different from professional studio portraiture of the time. They prompt questions about the nature of the relationship between the subject and the individual taking the photo, the purpose of the photo, and, perhaps most interesting, why these images were ultimately discarded and sent to a thrift store.

A group of such vernacular photographs can help us better understand an era — poses, styles, values, and more. With changing technology, they also serve to remind us of our changing relationship to photography. Nearly everyone now has access to high-quality cameras, on their phones in their pockets. While we are now less likely to encounter a stash of such photos in a thrift store, the ease of saving photos to hard drives or the cloud, or posting them digitally to social media, means we may never be rid of our (potentially embarrassing) past.

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