vernacular photography. the language of commercial slavery.

Studio  photography has always fascinated me.The studio photographs is a  photographic document where the documented  have  more than just a hint of control over how they are re presented. They pay the  photographer and retain some control over their image. An image in whose making they have a participatory    and collaborative control.  

I did use the word 'vernacular' when I  first started working on ' Rotigraphy'  - the photography from small Indian studios, but I dropped it when someone pointed out that the word meant " the language of the slave born at home" . The language that is a mix of the Master's language and his own mother tongue, i suppose.

This little article looks at some so called 'vernacular' photography. But it does it through photographs by  well known native photographers that the West has 'discovered and whose work visually echoes its own portrait traditons.

And the West's gallery system, I know,   will allow the discovery of just so many  'vernacular' Masters. Too many would be bad for business. Bad for the limited market for  photography by the "other '. 

The discourse around native 'vernacular' photography   is still  being controlled by the West's gallery  system. It's commercial character actually  controls the language of and the discourse around the 'vernacular' photographic visual. 

This short article is still a good read  though. . 

Photography has become a means of autobiography and a broadcast art. It's a way of keeping track what we wore last year and telling the world what we did last night. But as portraiture has become ubiquitous, it hasn't gained in power. The ability to pierce or possess the viewer is still given to only a few images out of the billions.

Before Facebook, there was the photo studio: a room, a camera, and a photographer. Once upon a time, studio portraiture was an essential part of the visual vernacular. Like most vernaculars, studio photography was at once ubiquitous and invisible. Along with mug shots, crime scene photographs, aerial surveys and family snapshots, it belonged to the teeming undergrowth of photography, the network of practices and forms that sometimes predate and often anticipate its emergence as a recognized art form. In the hands of its greatest practitioners, it's without question an art in its own right. But great portraits can also be the result of bureaucratic procedure, automatic gesture, or blind luck.

Studio photography is always at risk of seeming banal, and indeed, most of the photographs produced in portraiture's heyday seem today either rote or bland.

http://www.theawl.com/2012/10/the-uncanny-art-of-studio-photographys-heyday

                              Rotigraphy ! Rote, but not bland .  (The Satish Sharma Collection)