David and our friend Glen went to the flea market this past weekend and came back with an amazing find. I collect vernacular photography (in other words snapshots, or photography by amateurs of everyday life) and on Sunday David found a treasure (freaking awesome, was how he described it). There are 4 of these little albums, each with close to 250 small prints in them and I've never seen anything like them. These pictures don't do it justice at all, and my "someday" plan for a vernacular photography blog may have to become a "now" plan. Before the days of digital cameras and blogs, most people took pictures on only the most important of occasions - new babies, new houses, new cars, new marriages - but this man took pictures of everything. Most old albums show people standing up straight in their Sunday best and smiling their brightest, but these photos, even when posed, are very real. The children act like children (even bonking each other on the head sometimes and never grinning vacantly), the adults are genuinely having fun in real situations (like playing monopoly or dressing up for Halloween) and the lighting and composition are the work of someone who fundamentally understands the power of photography. The albums cover the years between 1951 and 1954 and the life of him, his growing family and his friends has been completely documented. The images seem to cover every subject - from the little boy licking the batter spoon and the baby sleeping in her high chair, to family dinners and Christmas from every angle, to cocktail parties and friends making out on the sofa, to cheesecake photos of the wife, to his work, to scuba diving and his darkroom and even some experiments with artistic nude self-portraits. They are truly amazing, and I feel so honoured to be the guardian of them. I only wish that there were more. Like so many of the albums I've collected, these ones are totally anonymous - the only person identified in any of them is the little boy - Ricky - and there are clues to a location, but even with just the images, I feel like I know these people and I'm glad they've been saved by someone who will treasure their memories. I started collecting vernacular photography because I felt so guilty leaving those people sitting in thrift stores or on swap-meet tables. How could I let those lives be forgotten? I grieved for the elderly person who had died and left these precious documents with no one to care for them, so that they ended up in estate sales or thrift stores if they were lucky, or in the garbage if they weren't. Seeing albums documenting entire lives being cut up so single images could be sold on eBay made me feel sick. We started buying all those collected memories that have somehow lost caretakers. Looking at all the images I've gathered, with their stories of, above all, love, shows me that every single life is an amazing story and every person is important. 
