I'm Sarah Meister, and we're here in the Department of Photography Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art. This is right next to our collection storage, and we've pulled a few photographs to give a sense of the scale and the materiality of these photographs. When you can look at a picture front and back, and look at the border and the mounting and the scale, it tells you a lot about the photographer's ambition and intent. Whether you're holding a little photo post card in your hand and you can see that it was postmarked, that there's a stamp on it. That it's tiny with handwriting on the back, it's a very different experience than looking at a photograph that was made by a photographer with real artistic ambition. And all of those things become evident when you look at the actual print. There were three broad categories of non-artistic uses of photography, and making pictures of the moon at the end of the 19th century. One of these were the scientists who were using photography to create atlases to explore and document the world. There was also a group of photographers who were amateurs. So, in the late 1880s when Kodak introduced his number one camera, with the slogan you push the button, we do the rest. Everyone was then, theoretically at least, able to walk out with a camera, push a button and take a picture. And the third category of non-artistic photography that was very common in the late 19th century, were commercial practices. So, these were photographers who made their living through photography. They often operated commercial studios where people would go to have their picture made, and all three of these were perceived to be a threat to the notion of photography's status as a fine art. We have someone like Edward Steichen and the Photo-Secessionists, and one of the ways that they sought to distinguish themselves was by making their prints look almost like drawings. By emphasizing the craftsmanship needed, and the virtuosity needed to make a print at a large scale. So, Steichen's beautiful Moonrise, Mamaroneck shows this very luminous, mysterious pool where the trees are reflecting in it, and the moon is just creeping above the horizon. And it has this incredible tone of blue in it. It declares itself immediately by its scale, by its sort of sfumato, by the smoky effect to be a work of art. And it is light years away from a studio shot of the moon, where a girl is sort of coyly holding her hat while sitting on a cut-out of a paper moon. And the effect of this is just one of fun, of embracing photography's capacity for illusion. This picture in particular is printed on a photo post card, which were very common around the turn of the 20th century. Vernacular is really the umbrella term for all photographs that were made not as works of art. But this branch of photography, of vernacular photography, has been incredibly important throughout photography's history. And whether it's the language of commercial advertising, photography, newspapers, and illustrations in magazines, how that informed the kind of photographs that photographers with artistic ambition were making, and vice versa. So that interplay has been very important throughout photography's history. And it's why MOMA, even as a Museum of Modern Art collects vernacular images from the beginning of photography's history.
