Two new BU exhibits find art in everyday images

For much of the history of photography, nearly every photograph was a vernacular photograph. The medium was a means rather than end: a means to record, to celebrate, to communicate. Photography still retains all those uses, of course -- they're more popular than ever -- but at least certain forms of picture-taking long ago earned the status of fine art.

One of the joys of ''In the Vernacular," the altogether cherishable show that runs through Jan. 23 at the Boston University Art Gallery, is its demonstration of just how much beauty and interest the simple passage of time can endow old photographs with. What once seemed pass or banal now looks striking and exotic.

That the purely mundane can carry such aesthetic weight is borne out by the number of art photographers who today employ elements of the vernacular in their work, such as snapshots and family albums. The work of several such artists makes up ''Contemporary Vernacular," the nicely complementary show at the Photographic Resource Center that also runs through Jan. 23.

It's not as if the worth of vernacular photography is a new discovery. In the '70s, to cite an example close to home, the photographer/curator Barbara Norfleet did pioneering work at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts collecting the work of commercial photographers.

Yet the interest has vastly grown. Last year, there was ''Photobooth" at the Griffin Museum of Photographyin Winchester. Last week, ''Close to Home: An American Album" opened at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. A rising tide lifts all light meters, past and present: As the prestige -- and price -- of vintage art photographs have taken off, so have the prestige -- and price -- of vernacular photographs.

The appeal of vernacular photography isn't hard to fathom. Few things better communicate the sheer pastness of the past. Few things better communicate the sheer variousness of the past. And few things better communicate the sheer liveliness of the past. That's true even when there's a corpse filling much of the frame, as in ''Gunned Down," a tabloid shocker worthy of Weegee at his sanguinary best.

''Gunned Down" is attributed to that legend of Boston photojournalism, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Forman. That's one mark of a vernacular photograph: You often can't be sure who did it. Lest we forget, the most important name in photographic history -- certainly, the most popular -- is Anonymous.

As a classic gelatin silver print, ''Gunned Down" is somewhat unusual for ''In the Vernacular." Among the exhibit's 170 items are images made by numerous other technical processes: daguerreotypes, albumen prints, Polaroids. And one emphasizes ''items" rather than pictures because the show also includes decorative plates, postcards, X-rays, visiting cards, snapshots, studio portraits, ads, girlie calendars, stereographs, greeting cards, photo-booth portraits, mug shots, and even a photo-covered bandana. (It's hard to get more vernacular than that without crossing over into haberdashery.)

All these items were so much a part of the fabric of people's lives -- and the cotton in that bandana is the least of it. These homely, unpretentious images are three-dimensional and concrete as even the greatest masterworks of photography rarely are. Flesh-and-blood individuals are attached to them in ways that can be enchanting, heartbreaking, or both. Who knew, as we learn from one photograph, that in Manhattan a 5-pound box of caramels went for 33 cents in 1920? Think of all the appetite, the clink of coins, the click of carious teeth bound up in that image.

Or consider the contact sheet with portraits of the 35 first-graders at the Bruce School in West Lynn, class of 1921: so many small windows into the lives of nearly three dozen small humans. Might any of them still be alive? Even reading this article? Yet affecting as is the sight of these eager young faces, much more moving is what's visible on the reverse side: each child's name written in perfect copperplate.

Thanks to their anonymous teacher (only teachers, and Bartleby the Scrivener, ever write in so fine a hand), we know the children's identities. There are other identifiable people in ''In the Vernacular: Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Louis Stevenson, William McKinley, Marilyn Monroe, Gustave Courbet.

Fame will take a person only so far, though. None of them, not even Monroe in her famous nude calendar pose, is as memorable as the dual portrait of Mr. and Mrs. A.H. Cinch, circa 1870, or, from 1940, the bathing-cap-wearing female in ''Woman and inflatable horse in pool."

That so many of these images afford such an amazing entre into the past carries a danger. It can obscure how often these pictures are aesthetically remarkable, too. ''Vernacular" is no synonym for ugly. As noted, ''Gunned Down" bears comparison with Weegee. The contact sheet for ''Biplane and Target," with its superimposed bull's-eye, looks like a sketch for a David Salle painting crossed with a Robert Longo painting: all blank menace and dire premonition. Art often just happens, a conceptual objet trouv and again and again that happy serendipity gets demonstrated here.

The artfulness in ''Contemporary Vernacular" is always conscious -- and frequently forced. Susan E. Evans, for example, has created a pair of installations that mimic the sort of photo arrangements that people commonly have on mantelpieces or dressers: groupings of various-sized small brass frames with portraits of loved ones. The catch is that there are no photos in the frames. Instead, they uniformly contain black paper that bears white-lettered titles like ''Susie Glamour Portrait" or ''Jack First Communion." As meta-jokes go, it's funny enough, and it has the kick of a good window dresser's display. Of course, window dressers generally have better things to do than patronize the relationship the average person has to photography.

Joseph Heidecker takes old photographs and superimposes his own work on them. The results are visually arresting but troubling. The act of appropriation bases itself on a fundamental arrogance: Heidecker automatically takes precedence over the identity of the sitter or handiwork of the original photographer.

There are happier results with other artists, such as Nancy Dudley and Yolando del Amo, who incorporate elements of their own experience in their works. Del Amo's grandmother, who inspires her '' 'My Little One Comes First' " series, comes across so vividly she seems to be auditioning for an Almodovar movie. Or there's Priya Kambli's ''Suitcase Series": small wooden boxes opened to reveal family photographs and other objects of personal significance. They inevitably recall Joseph Cornell's boxes, except where Cornell traded in dreams Kambli offers memories, memories made spatial as well as visual.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.