Tattered and Lost – Vernacular Photography

Tattered and Lost Vernacular Photography blog is run anonymously by an imaginative, dedicated blogger, who also publishes books on vernacular photography. There is an element of fun in most of the posts, a lot of social history and some melancholia. Through keen observations and sometimes, lateral thinking, the commentaries on each photo reveals something more about American life, past and present, than might have been clear at first glance.

Evidence of the author’s vital imagination oozes from this blog, no more so than in the Time Travelling Celebrity category, which recently featured a photobooth photo of a gentlemen who very closely resembles the British actor Alan Cummings. (Click here to see original post). The author supposes that Alan has slipped into a time machine and whizzed back to 1940s USA, recording the adventure in the photo, above.

I love the concept of this series. In my mind there is a connection between a photobooth and Doctor Who’s TARDIS. They are of similar size and form and one can enter into each and then close out the rest of time and space. They are both “bigger on the inside” – one’s intentions and imagination creating the illusion of this, in the case of the photobooth. Finally they are both vehicles of time travel. The TARDIS can travel infinite distances through space and time. Photobooths work more slowly, sealing a fragment of time on paper,  a moment that moves with the rest of us at a minute at a time, hour by hour, day by day.  (See my photos in the category Photobooth Time Machines).

There are more photobooth photos to be found on the blog, like the one above, and there are many more to be found in the archive link, here.

Below are two more notable examples. I hope you will visit Tattered and Lost Vernacular Photography and enjoy exploring  what you find there.