Just Like Home: Photo Album on the Edge of the Everyday

Abstract

In the last few decades, we have observed an increased interest in photography as an object of study of the everyday, as well as of the formation of everyday habits and aesthetics. It is no longer understood strictly as an artistic entity, a document, or a personal commodity, but – under the impression of a material turn – it is experiencing a substantial renaissance as a complex tool for learning about the socio-cultural parameters of a given community or space-time with a specific aesthetics. The photographic history, rather than the history of photography, involves a series of tools and methodological procedures that make the photographic image not only a source of banal information but is understood as a saturated structure. Institutional practice becomes one of the key themes, with the archive establishing itself alongside collections. Or rather, and this is what the text focuses on, the photo album – is a complex tool on the borderline between active and passive perception, personal and shared experience, image, and text. How does this medium work in the context of contemporary art practice? What means does it have at its disposal when the author turns his attention to the problem of “everyday”? And can we truly talk about specific aesthetic attributes?