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The Architecture of Everyday Places: Nineteenth Century Photographs of the Vernacular

Presented by Snite Museum of Art at Snite Museum of Art

November 2-December 14, 2008

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The Snite Museum of Art is pleased to announce the opening of the The Architecture of Everyday Places: Nineteenth Century.  Selected almost exclusively from the Janos Scholz Collection at the Snite Museum, this exhibit of nineteenth-century photographs explores some manifestations of the vernacular. Also called architecture without architects, vernacular architecture is part of our everyday environment. Houses, garages, additions or sheds, reflect how we have constructed and modified our dwellings to meet our needs: physical needs for shelter or convenience, and psychological needs for comfort and status. The study of vernacular architecture reveals much about the history and significance of our built environment. These photographs have been selected for their multi-faceted quality as visual documents. For us today, they have acquired a different resonance from their intended purpose for the photographers and consumers who made, commissioned, and collected these images.

Exploration of the vernacular in nineteenth century photographs implies a paradox of closeness and distance. These photographs were taken when vernacular traditions were still the predominant mode of designing and building common structures, prior to the industrialization of building techniques and materials. Many of them were also taken before the demolition of older urban fabrics to make way for urban renewal. While they captured a stage in the evolution of the built environment that we can no longer recover, they are also mediated views. The visual and topical selections made by the photographers and the accidents of survival provide us only a fragementary corpus from which to study the vernacular. And the physical two-dimensional nature of photographs precludes the customary three-dimensional field work and recording techniques of vernacular studies. This paradox of mediated immediacy makes particularly intriguing to us today the invitation to investigate extended by these photographs. Selected as primary material for study, rather than as aesthetic objects, these photographs also reflect the technical development of the medium during the first decades of photographic practice by professional and amateur photographers but this is not our focus of here. Rather, this exhibition is an invitation to look and ponder on the lives, values and aspirations of the people who dwelled in nineteenth century everyday places, and trigger our thinking on the gains, and losses, that are embedded in our everyday places today.