I keep the snapshots not for what they show but for what is hidden in them.
Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, 14

I'm experimenting with wikification of my Nova Scotia Faces project, with the object of soliciting help from vernacular photography enthusiasts. This may turn out to be a mistake, but we won't know until we try, right?

 

I started putting items into Flickr in November 2005, one or two a day (see the set here, and for a really good time, try viewing as a slideshow), but that was simply too slow, or anyway that's what Gardner said. And it's all very well for me to give my readings of these gems, but it would be at least as interesting to hear what others have to say. Some people have added comments to the (more detailed, larger) Flickr versions of the images.

 

Bottom line: if you'd like to play in this territory, email me (blackmerh@wlu.edu) and I'll get Schtuff to issue you an Invitation to be a Participant/Collaborator, with powers to edit and so on.

 

To give you a jumping-off place, consider the possible tags and captions for this one...

These images are vernacular in the sense that they were primarily of interest to small numbers of people --immediate family and friends. Many were taken by professional photographers (and most are, in fact, meant to be portraits), though some of the most fascinating are 'snapshots', amateur productions which achieve a sort of eloquence via naive framing and selection of subject matter. Each is a bundle of details that might be decoded and turned into a story. Each is an undefended glimpse into the life of a real person or group of people. I poke fun at a lot of the subjects, but deep down I realize that I love them, and that, after 25+ years of looking at them, my own life is entangled with theirs, though our temporal existences mostly don't overlap. I rescued them from junk-store oblivion, and putting them up here breathes new life into their mostly-anonymous selves.

The categories below have gradually emerged as I made subsets of the photographs. Within any category, the order of presentation is tentative and provisional, and in a few cases I've included an image under more than one heading. I've found it VERY interesting to look through the corpus defined by these sets, and I continue to tinker with commentary and sequence.

 

Poor Alice G.

 

singletons

pairs

 

 

couples

 

weddings

 

the little stranger

 

baby pictures

 

horrid children

 

adolescents

 

rites of passage

 

families

 

sibling sets

 

lionesses

 

hair genes

 

beards and moustaches

 

groups

 

posing for a photograph

 

the new car

the art of layout

 

Miss E. Woodward's album

 

what Naum knew: the Young album

Lizzie Ritchie's album

 

another Ritchie album

 

the Risser album

 

Alalia Stevens' album

 

gem album

 

occupations

 

Annapolis Valley apples

 

soldiers

 

nurses

 

hats

 

hair

 

fashion

 

head shapes

 

Nova Scotians at play

 

postcards from away

 

gone but not forgotten

 

unlikely clergymen

 

ambrotypes

 

tintypes

more tintypes

and still more tintypes even more tintypes

 

cartes de visite more cartes de visite and more cartes de visite

 

cabinet cards

 

canine indignities

 

the tale of David Anderson Behie

 

from Laura

 

Joe Wilner wilner continued and more wilner

 

from Heidi

 

20th Connecticut Volunteers

 

enigmata

 

unclassified

 

For the geographically curious, there's a fine map of Nova Scotia place names in pdf form (use the zoom function to see details). At some point I'll add links to surname geography work I did some years ago, which intersects in a number of interesting ways.