The afterlife of found photographs

The world is scattered with unhinged vernacular snaps. EBay is a giant and ever-changing album of examples for sale. Each of these photos is past its original use. Found photographs are at once replete with life and
hearsed in death. Adding to this, the analogue vernacular snap is itself a type of photography that is essentially past its use-‐by date. If photography is the medium of record, what are we to make of these recently redundant records? Do they capture Benjamin’s idea of the dialectic at a standstill or just mum in her pyjamas? They concertina time and make trouble for it — and us. This paper will look at what might be made of found photographs: what meanings might be gleaned from them, and what we might find in the accumulation of details. We will closely look at examples that press the limits of photographic representation as if on a dare.