The Smithsonian's First Photographer
Vernacular photography is the latest type of photography to be discovered by museums. Postcards, collected by Walker Evans (but still, postcards), have just been exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a tintype exhibition just closed at the International Center of Photography in New York, another exhibit of snapshots was seen at the National Gallery of Art. In fact, a spate of recent exhibitions, publications, and conferences argues that everyday photographs, taken by people presumably innocent of aesthetic intentions, but busy doing the business of other disciplines, or pre-occupied with making a record of their personal lives, have become worthy of our attention. Why? Have we run out of masterpieces by known artists? Or have we begun to dig deeper into the archives that have silted up since photography’s invention and in so doing have we begun to unearth a larger, fuller history of photography than has been written to date? In addition to being the Smithsonian’s first staff photographer, Thomas Smillie was also the institution’s first photography curator. Interestingly, in 1896 when a formal Section of Photography was established Smillie was titled "Custodian" and the first objects he collected—for the sum of $23 he bought the daguerreotype camera and photographic apparatus used by Samuel Morse, one of the first Americans to experiment with photography—were called "specimens." Smillie’s activity as photographer and curator matched the interests and expansion of the Smithsonian itself. By the late 1880s Smillie’s list of photographs, either ones he made or made by others which he collected, included subjects from a growing array of disciplines: ethnological and archaeological, lithological, mineralogical, ornithological, metallurgical, and perhaps the most enticing category of all, miscellaneous. As Albert Moore, the man who sold Smillie Morse’s equipment, wrote, the Smithsonian seemed to be "making a museum of photography." 
For Smillie the history of photography was the sum of all its functions, from the most prosaic to the most aetheticized. In 1913 for the first exhibition of photography at the Smithsonian, which fittingly took place in the Arts and Industries building, Smillie arranged the photographs in a rough chronological order in displays that highlighted their value as documents of history, as portrayers of American life, as tools of science and technology, and as artistic images. Even so, nothing about the exhibition suggested that one function of photography was elevated above any other. At heart, Smillie’s view of photography presented a unified field in which art and function are inseparable. Photography’s scientific, commercial, and vernacular functions were all part of a single conversation about images. In today’s digital media age, it is a conversation, I suspect, that we will be having more often. 
View more photographs by Thomas Smillie.
Merry Foresta is the Former Director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative.
Comments (14) – Leave a comment
A very interesting article. You seem a bit skeptical of the whole concept of vernacular photographs---personally, in the majority of cases, I find the artlessness of the vernacular more appealing than the artifice of the art photographer. And that statement seems truer to me the closer we get to 2009, the closer we get to the Jeff Wall's and the Thomas Struth's and the Geoffrey Crewdson's.
I'm new to blogging, so I might not have the tone of my posts down yet. And that might account for not making myself clear about vernacular photos. In fact, I meant to say that Smillie, and the kind of images he and Smithsonian staff photographers past and present have made for all kinds of reasons, create a very valid category of photographs. In general, "working class," vernacular photographs give us a broader look at photography as a whole. Smillie certainly thought so when he created an exhibition that illustrated every purpose for photography --- even art. I agree, contemporary artists like Wall, Struth, and Crewdson certainly do seem to call on photography's vernacular side, and that is very interesting.
Very interesting article. I would be somewhat skeptical too about the vernacular photography concept...it might have some interesting aspects though.
I applaud Smillie's vision. Yes, my name is Thomas Smillie. There are a few of us out there.
Tom, I am so curious: how do you pronounce your last name? I've always thought it was Smile-e.
I've been re-reading my original blog post and the comments that have grown up around the idea of vernacular. I had hoped to suggest that vernacular photography, including that made by museum photographers, commercial photography, everyday snapshot photography, should be included in a large history of photography. It is vernacular photography (outside the box of fine art photography) that gives us a deeper, richer idea about the power of photography. Thomas Smillie, whether he knew it at the time or not, gave us an important new way to think about photography as a whole
In a larger sense, photography as art - vs. mere documentation - has been debated since 1839 when the daguerreotype was unveiled. Yet art and documentation are two aspects of what is often called fine art photography. As I continue to write in my website/blog: http://www.contemporary-art-dialogue.com/photography-as-art.html, the camera's ability to mechanically record what it aimed at gave it instant value for reportage in a manner far more powerful than the painter's tools. The popular perception was that the photograph does not lie, that it recorded reality. This gave the photograph unparalleled power.
This was a really interesting post. Is there a way to subscribe to the RSS feed for your blog?
John Szarkowski published one anonymous photo in his book "Looking at Photographs." It was a postcard showing apples from someone's tree. On the reverse it said: "How 'bout them apples?" The vernacular is always with us, for many reasons.
Glad to see these exposed to the light of day. When I first started to work with these cyanotypes at SI Archives I became convinced they were Smillie's reference collection to all the negatives he created in the course of his work as a lab photographer for the institution. What is needed is to organize them by negative number and not by the silly arbitrary way they are in RU 95. They should be treated as the product of his handiwork as an unsung worker in the history of federal and washington photography.
Mike, I couldn't agree more...Smillie is one of the unsung stars of American photo history.
I am constantly struck by how the most mundane of photographs become culturally significant with the passage of time. It's also interesting to see how seemingly mundane photographs from one culture will hold great interest to viewers in another culture. For example photographs of British suburbia may be of great interest in a Japanese rural community and vice-versa.
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