Over the last year, MoMA’s Department of Photography has been home to the poet Robin Coste Lewis, who joined us as part of the inaugural cohort of Ford Foundation Scholars in Residence. During her residency, Coste Lewis expressed an interest in the Museum’s holdings of vernacular photography. Her recent book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022), is a genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration through a personal meditation on the photographic vernacular of her own family.

With the support of curatorial assistant Antoinette Roberts, Coste Lewis and I worked through the Museum’s expansive holdings of vernacular photographs—encountering elaborate albums, intimate portraits, touching snapshots, and even “trick pictures” that playfully anticipate the formal photographic interventions popular among the European avant-garde. MoMA’s collection gallery Visual Vernaculars unites photographs such as these alongside a selection of works inflected by the logic of the everyday. The artworks on view in this gallery inspired Coste Lewis to write a number of texts, which appear below. Speaking directly to the pictures on view, her poetic ruminations reveal the role of photography in the construction of a self-image, giving form to interrelated social identities, relationships, and communities.
—Oluremi C. Onabanjo

The mother has been a recurring figure throughout human history. Goddesses, Divinities, the One Who Gives Birth to the entire universe. Images, objects, epics, and hymns that exalt the maternal saturate every aspect of artistic engagement regardless of location, continent, time period, or medium. With the advent of photography in the 19th century, this artistic phenomenon continued from the earliest of photographic technologies: daguerreotypes and ambrotypes. And because of the accessibility photography offered—and still offers—to everyday people, photography’s vernacular historical record is saturated with images of mothers of all kinds.

Our family albums tell us who We are together. They are also the crumbs we leave on the forest ground for future generations to discover—in order to find their ways home. In photo albums, the Me transforms these images into the We. This was and remains the primary gift of photography’s democratizing force. Suddenly, with the advent of the camera, an entire flurry of images—cheap and reproducible—were at our fingertips. Beauty was no longer reserved solely for the walls of libraries and museums, whose collections had always been private, reserved for the upper classes. Now, with photography, absolutely anyone could walk into the frame. This is especially evident in photo albums. A photo album is a private museum and a self-published book all braided into one. And because they were preserved—for us—these albums are also now rare historical objects who tell us who We once were—and were not.

Visual Vernaculars is on view in MoMA’s fifth-floor collection galleries through August 2024.