Lost and Found: Stories for Vernacular Photographs

The collector Robert E. Jackosn’s eleven-thousand-plus vernacular photos—amateur photos taken by individuals that have ended up in thrift shops or on eBay or in a bin at a yard sale—come to us as objects without context. Jackson has been collecting vernacular photographs, some of them dating back to the late nineteenth century, for nearly two decades now; since 2017, UNC has been working with him to assemble a collection (Jackson, a UNC alumnus, has also exhibited his photos at Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among other museums). The exhibit opening coincides with the 2nd Friday ArtWalk in Chapel Hill and will run through January 12. Teeing up the month-long exhibit, the Ackland’s “context contest” invites viewers to submit captions and short stories in response to twenty of the seventy photos on display. Encountering lost photos like these—happy and tender moments filled with the flicker of birthday candles and innocuous private moments— evokes a kind of weird, bittersweet nostalgia. If imagination is an act of empathy, then filling in the blanks with these pictures feels like one good way to do these lost (now found) photographs justice.