Vernacular Photography from the Collection of Nicholas Osborn

Exhibition on view: March 10-April 29, 2017
Opening reception: Friday, March 10, 6-8pm

To collect photographs is to collect the world (Susan Sontag). Since the camera’s invention nearly 200 years ago, an inconceivable number of images have been produced documenting every aspect of the world around us. While a great number of these images have been preserved in museums and archives, the vast majority of them, most meant to serve a specific purpose long since fulfilled, have been discarded and forgotten. Collector Nicholas Osborn has spent the last twenty years digging through these lost images at flea markets and estate sales, in antique stores and online, searching for images as striking as any in the fine art canon. In Sequences and Singularities, he brings together work from a wide variety of makers across the full breadth of the 20th century – crime scene investigators and hairdressers, casual family snap-shooters and small studio photographers – that collapse the distances between fine art and document, image and object.