BOSTON, MA.- In the Vernacular: Everyday Photographs from the Rodger Kingston Collection is the first exhibition to fully highlight the exceptional breadth and variety of the Rodger Kingston collection. Since the 1970s, Kingston has assembled a vast collection of visually striking images by primarily anonymous photographers. Drawing from this collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs and photo objects, In the Vernacular will explore some of the many functions that photographs have had outside the gallery and museum. The types of images and objects on display will be familiar to the contemporary viewer: snapshots, wedding photographs, news and advertising images, insurance pictures, family pictures, travel albums, school class portraits, pin-up photos, calendars, identification badges, photo buttons, and even a photographic bandana.

Over the last 160 years, photographs have been made, used, collected, and discarded in greatly increasing numbers. Despite the photograph's growing presence in daily life, until recently most types of everyday photography have remained unexamined by historians and have been absent from the walls of galleries and museums. An increasing awareness of the ubiquity of photographic production and use, and of the absorption of modern social life with photography in all its many forms, is leading scholars to consider photography as a 'vernacular' practice. This reframing of the history of photography serves as the starting point for In the Vernacular. Despite the possibility of misinterpretation, the term, "vernacular" is purposefully used in the exhibition to generate multiple associations. In a broad sense, "vernacular" defines that which is domestic or indigenous. In popular usage, the term refers to the common or everyday, and can further identify the personal or private. "Vernacular photography," therefore, represents the kind of photographic production that permeates daily existence.