Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography

A 1200-word book review for Visual Studies journal (the journal of the International Visual Sociology Association). Extract:
"I confess that I first picked up the heavyweight book, Imagining Everyday Life, with a heavy heart. In my own work on the subject, I have long argued for the limitations and even redundancy of the term vernacular as a photographic qualifier. I saw the Walther Collection on the cover and thought of the 2000 exhibition and publication Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, which took a celebratory ‘lost masterpiece’ lens to its decontextualised subject matter and was part of a wider and often uncritical boom in publications that developed an expanding art market for orphaned imagery. I assumed that this book would continue in the mould, and I wondered why so little progress had been made, some 20 years on from the special issue of History of Photography that gathered curators, collectors and scholars to debate the form and the term.
I am pleased to be wrong in many of my assumptions. Imagining Everyday Life brings much needed fresh perspective to the subject, with original and reflective contributions from major names and emerging voices alongside some 432 images. [...]"