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Art by accident
Eye of the beholder
By David J. Craig
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First Grade, Bruce School, West Lynn, Mass., November 1921, anonymous. Gelatin silver print. |
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Flipping through a box of photographs in a New Hampshire antique shop 20 years ago, Rodger Kingston found a composite of what appeared at first glance to be 35 rather ordinary grammar school portraits. Examining the images closely, however, he saw candid expressions and gestures not typical of commercial portraiture: a boy with a devilish grin has to be the class clown, the prettiest girl sits up straight with palpable self-assuredness, and a smirking thick-necked boy reveals himself as a bully.
Kingston, a photography collector who lives in the Boston area, bought the piece for a buck. He has no idea who took the photos; handwriting on the back indicates they were shot in Lynn, Mass., in 1921. “They speak to me,” he says. “Every image is interesting and shows a real kid, nothing phony. The photographer did what every photographer hopes to do: let you draw connections, find meanings.”
Did the photographer consider himself or herself an artist? And should that influence our response to the work?
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L. P. Hollander Co. Christmas photograph, c. 1930, anonymous, American. Gelatin silver print. |
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Those are the types of questions that viewers will likely confront at the exhibition In the Vernacular: Everyday Photographs from the Rodger Kingston Collection, at the BU Art Gallery from November 5 to January 23. The 150 works by mostly anonymous photographers include wedding photos, news shots, magazine ads, insurance pictures, family candids, travel images, and pinup photographs.
“The focus of the exhibition is how photography functions in everyday life, and how people come into contact with and experience photos,” says Stacey McCarroll (GRS’04), gallery director and one of the exhibition’s curators. “It includes all sorts of visually striking images that have been excluded from discussions of fine art photography. Some are fun, others thought-provoking. You might wonder, ‘What was this taken for?’”
Kingston began collecting vernacular photos, or those taken for utilitarian purposes by unestablished photographers, in the early 1970s. His collection, which is housed
at BU’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, contains more than 4,000 photos and photo objects made from the 1840s to the mid-20th century. He has lent many of the pieces to major museum exhibitions around the country in the past few years; some have been reproduced in textbooks on the history of photography, which only recently began recognizing vernacular photography.
Kingston is drawn to vernacular photos, he says, because they tend to “let objects speak for themselves, rather than have an artistic viewpoint imposed upon them.” McCarroll praises his eye for “quirky, slightly skewed” compositions.
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The Great Pyramid, Cairo, c. 1890, anonymous. Photochromolithograph. Photos courtesy of the Rodger Kingston Collection |
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His collection is remarkable also for being limited to works that are, well, cheap. “People with fat wallets can build up collections of masters, but I never could afford the price required for photo historians’ validation,” says Kingston. The 63-year-old former barber now makes his living as a fine art and commercial photographer. “I developed an aesthetic as a collector by paying no attention to what is valuable or trendy. I grabbed every photo that caught my eye, and that could be anything, believe me. It seems that people’s interests now are in line with my tastes. I got lucky.”
Kingston will lecture about his collection at 5 p.m. on Friday, November 5, at the College of General Studies Jacob Sleeper Auditorium; the exhibition’s opening reception will follow, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the BU Art Gallery. The gallery will host an interdisciplinary conference about vernacular photography on November 5 and 6. For more information, call 617-353-3329, or visit www.bu.edu/art.
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November 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations