The archival shot, the found photograph and the vernacular image continue to exert a hold on our imagination at a time when, as the Discovery award selection shows, much contemporary photography has become obsessed with the conceptual process.
Another vernacular image, a Currier & Ives lithograph titled "Into Mischief," from around 1857, shows a toddler wreaking havoc in a nursery — a rare image of a girl misbehaving, in a cultural landscape that included mischievous boys like Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.
But the question of who is educated and who is consigned to hard labor is raised in vernacular images like Myron H. Kimball's photograph "Emancipated Slaves Brought From Louisiana by Col. Geo.
Maybe that's why the visual vernacular of images, emoji, those cartoons text characters, and GIFs are all so popular.
In "Notations in Passing," Mr. Lyons's pictures were largely about vernacular public images: ads, posters, graffito drawings, display mannequins.
Most of the reference images come from a huge personal archive I have of vernacular, pop-culture images.
Cwynar, who constructs tableaux from stock imagery and obsolete photography manuals, told me at the time that she draws on "a huge personal archive … of vernacular, pop-culture images".
Shore is an altogether quieter photographer, but there is quirky humour in his images of vernacular buildings and signage that has often been overlooked.
Ringing the gallery in a single closely spaced line, they reiterate his crystalline, groundbreaking black-and-white images of vernacular architecture from the 1930s, but with fuzzy forms, seeping color and fading light.
Initially, he experimented with Abstract Expressionism, but he soon turned to the found words and images drawn from vernacular culture that would come to inform all his work.
His richly hued images of the vernacular architecture of the deep south – wooden churches, shacks and dilapidated houses – were all made in Hale County, Alabama, south of the city of Tuscaloosa, where Christenberry was born and raised.
