Vernacular Impulses

Not sure if I've posted about Square America before, but a link on del.icio.us brought this vernacular photography site to my attention again. The images that triggered this post relate to a trove of photographs the site's owner bought that cataloged the life of a woman over the course of many years. Many are straight up portraits, some even from photobooths, but the first undated photo in the list is a particularly good street shot. And there's evidence that the typical early 21st century activity of shooting self-portraits in the bathroom mirror was trail blazed in the 1950s.

On a related note, last week Joerg kicked off some interesting commentary on his site about why this old-timey stuff gets so much attention while Flickr is looked down upon as a source of naive masterpieces. Alec Soth's posts (here and here and here) on the same subject are more exhaustive and I think that meme is probably gasping its last for a while.