1. The more Primitive the approach, the closer we are to the real event.

2. If we don't focus on theories, seconds, diaphragms and mathematical analysis, to capture a picture, we will have a more serious relation with the environment.

3. Vernacular is the folklore without philosophies and principles.

4. In modern days even a 5-year-old kid can make a better snapshot than a so-called professional photographer. Simply because the child is improvising without any universal or metaphysical formulas. He is free in the environment he represents and he doesn’t interrupt his thoughts in light phenomena’s.

5. Nowadays photography is everyone’s business.

The Electronic Journal of Vernacular Photography is Focuses on the idea that the closest approach a photographer can have to his environment is with fast improvisation.

The professional camera is a division between the photographer and his subject. Especially the bigger format cameras, they make the photographer a hunter and not an equal with the environment; probably the next step in the evolution of photography is the use of the vernacular idea.

Vernacular Concepts by John A. Kouwenhoven

The forms we have so long neglected are in reality the products of a unique kind of folk art, created under conditions which had never before existed. They represent the unself-conscious efforts of common people, in America and elsewhere, to create satisfying patterns out of the elements of a new and culturally unassimilated environment; but this patternmaking is something altogether different from the folk arts which in recent years have been collected and studied with such enthusiasm. It has nothing in common with the balladry of the Kentucky mountaineers or the decorative crafts of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Unlike these, it is the art of sovereign, even if uncultivated, people rather than of groups cut off from the main currents of contemporary life. The patterns it evolved were not those which are inspired by ancient traditions of race or class; on the contrary, they were imposed by the driving energies of an unprecedented social structure. In their least diluted form these patterns comprise the folk arts of the first people in history who, disinherited of a great cultural tradition, found themselves living under democratic institutions in an expanding machine economy. It is this unique factor of a democratic-technological vernacular which has been overlooked in our estimates of art in the United States. The development of folk-art forms is always hard to trace. No one bothers to note the patterns of colors, shapes, sounds, and ideas which plain people produce--at least no detailed record is kept until long after the patterns have crystallized and have become habitual. It is especially difficult to trace the emergence of this vernacular, for the patterns through which it evolved were not designed to be kept in frames on the wall, or cherished behind glass doors. These patterns formed tools, machines, buildings, and other objects for use in the routine of daily life. It was into the design of useful things that these people inevitably turned the universal creative instinct. Repressed artistic impulses found release in uncounted rudimentary and personal expressions. The purest form of this vernacular, the form in which its characteristics are most clearly revealed and can be most readily defined, is represented by technological design. Here craft tradition had least influence and the characteristic impulses of the new civilization were freest to display their energy in patterns available to all the people, cultivated and uncultivated alike.

The Pan-American Vernacular Society

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