Found Photographs

Visiting the Art Gallery of NSW on the weekend, I was intrigued to see (in the contemporary gallery downstairs) an exhibition of anonymous photographs, entitled Ghosts in the Machine. These mostly very small, black and white photographs were taken by unknown photographers and preserved by collectors. One the one hand, many of the photographs were poetic, absurd or surrealist images, often created by mistake. Yet they are also a precious record of everyday life, of ordinary people and the ways they sought to present themselves to the world -  we can gain access to a lost world through these private snapshots. These are the sorts of records Eurydice and Sharon might have yearned for when they were piecing together the life of Edna Lavilla, for example. They can also give us a sense of historical events from the point of view of the 'ordinary' person - one of the most striking (tiny) shots is of a group of WWII German soldiers running through the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. Who took the picture, and who was it for?

There are problems with this sort of work being exhibited, of course -  these were private photos that were never meant to become public, and I even found a website that offers 'vernacular photographs' for sale.  There is an intimacy to many of these images that made me feel slightly uncomfortable that they were on display in an art gallery, and not a history museum (or perhaps that they were on display at all). Are sites like flickr the contemporary equivalent of this phenomenon, where anyone can view anyone else's photographs, and where people who have posted their photos on these sites have found their images used in advertising campaigns?