By Tina Campt.

In Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, we're allowed to dive headfirst into the nitty-gritty of vernacular photography – you know, the everyday shots that capture life's unfiltered moments, not just the polished, Instagram-ready ones.

We're talking about pictures snapped for everything: From bureaucratic paperwork to personal mementos (not just your typical artsy-fartsy stuff). The brains at the Walther Collection teamed up with top-notch scholars and thinkers in photography, women’s studies, queer theory, Africana studies, and curatorial wizardry. Together, they're breaking down the theoretical walls of vernacular photography while digging into some mind-blowing case studies.

The book includes identification portraits of California migrant workers, underground physique photos of queer communities, and even one-of-a-kind military albums that span from the swamps of Louisiana to the jungles of Vietnam. It's a visual feast, and these essays spill the tea on a wide range of material formats, social uses, and shared communities. 

Imagining Everyday Life didn't just materialize out of thin air – it started as a raucous two-day symposium at Columbia University in 2018. The Walther Collection teamed up with Barnard’s Center for Research on Women and the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University to make this happen.

Now, this publication unfolds in four juicy parts: Why Vernacular Photography? The Limits and Possibilities of A Field; Troubling Portraiture: Photographic Portraits and The Shadow Archive; Performance and Transformation: Photographic (Re)visions of Subjectivity; and Space, Materiality and the Social Worlds of the Photograph.

These texts, written by a squad of brilliant minds including Ariella Azoulay, Geoffrey Batchen, Ali Behdad, and more, are your ticket to an experience that will hopefully redefine how you see photography in relation to our politics, personal mojo, and everyday rituals. 

400 pages.

6.8 x 1.3 x 9.8 inches.

Paperback.