Useful Photography

From Found Photography in the 1970s–90s to Useful Photography Around 2000

Useful Photography began around 2000 with Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain, Erik Kessels, Hans van der Meer, and others. Leiden University’s photography-history materials record that Aarsman co-founded the magazine in 2000 and focused each issue on a specific theme of “user’s photography”^*21. Erik Kessels’s official description likewise defines the material as anonymous photographs made for specific purposes in catalogs, manuals, packaging, brochures, and on the internet^*1. Individual issues went on to address online auctions, missing persons, livestock, before-and-after pictures, photography manuals, weddings, and continuity stills from film production^*2. The publisher’s description of the first issue similarly establishes the project’s basic premise: editing functional photographs never intended for public display so that they can be read differently^*3. The project also belongs to a longer trajectory. Since the 1970s, artists and editors had increasingly brought found photographs, family pictures, and working images into art and publishing. Eye Magazine traces precedents including Dick Jewell and Joachim Schmid and places the magazine Ohio, founded in 1994, and Useful Photography within the vernacular/found-photo publishing culture that expanded from the 1990s into the 2000s^*22.

Author-Centered Photography Markets and the Proliferation of “Other People’s Pictures” Online

Around 2000, fine-art photography was increasingly valued through limited editions, named authorship, and provenance, while family snapshots, product photographs, and internet images circulated in enormous quantities with little attention to who made them. Eye Magazine discusses the rise of found and vernacular photography through both dissatisfaction with an author-centered art-photography market and the accelerating exchange of images online^*22. The Photographers’ Gallery exhibition Found, Shared placed Useful Photography alongside Found Magazine and Ohio, presenting a magazine culture built from discarded prints, online images, amateur collage, and related material^*24. At the 2008 New York Photo Festival, Useful Photography appeared with Joachim Schmid and Peter Piller within The Ubiquitous Image, which treated copying, reproduction, and the vast accumulation of existing pictures as problems internal to contemporary photography^*23. Against this background, the editors turned away from making “new masterpieces” and toward searching the images already saturating social life, then resequencing them according to use. An inexpensive, repeatable magazine was also well suited to preserving the quantity and seriality that originally characterized utilitarian photographs.

Asking First What a Photograph Was For

Useful Photography selects images according to the work they performed, not primarily the photographer’s reputation or the formal accomplishment of a single picture. Issue 10 focuses on wedding photography and the repetition of conventional poses required by the ritual across different regions^*4. Issue 12 collects the “completed images” printed on jigsaw-puzzle boxes, repeating pictures whose purpose is to show what the correctly assembled product should look like^*5. Here, photographic banality becomes evidence of use. The large number of similar images reveals the functions and patterns society demanded from photography. The same kiss at a wedding, the completed puzzle, or a livestock animal posed for assessment are examples in which suppressing the photographer’s individuality can actually be a condition of success. This points toward a history different from fine-art photography’s emphasis on authorship.

Editing Replaces Picture-Taking—A Series Acquires Meaning Through Sequence

The library of the International Center of Photography holds Useful Photography as a continuing photographic publication and catalogs it as an editorial series, with individual authors secondary^*6. Eye Magazine argues that the project relativized a view of photography centered on the art market and editorial photography by recognizing the force of everyday images^*7. A single working photograph may look negligible, yet dozens or hundreds organized around the same use make the rules of photographic manuals, commerce, family ritual, or product classification visible. Editing itself becomes the production process through which photography’s social rules are discovered. Collecting only one use makes it possible to distinguish accidental interest in an individual picture from the common form demanded by that use. Sequence does not serve to select “masterpieces”; it makes the rules that governed the photographs comparable.

Why Not Take New Photographs? Preserving Anonymity and Purpose

In a VPRO interview, Hans Aarsman describes becoming dissatisfied with “beautiful photographs” made according to a predetermined style, taking fewer pictures himself, and turning instead to reading existing images from supermarkets, eBay, and other sources^*8. The decision not to restage the same subjects is central to Useful Photography. Recreating them would turn utilitarian images into artworks performing the look of utility and would remove the original purpose that shaped their form. Collecting images produced for actual use preserves the fact that social requirements often determined photographic form before an individual author’s intentions did.

The Magazine as Format—Building a “Specimen Box” of Photographs in Every Issue

A Guardian review of the 2007 Photographers’ Gallery exhibition Found, Shared argued that Useful Photography’s thematic editing worked effectively in magazine form, while enlarging the same material into monumental museum prints could erase the original use and scale of the images^*9. The criticism clarifies why the magazine format matters. Turning pages through small photographs and comparing similarities and differences resembles the reading of a catalog or reference book more than the contemplation of autonomous objects one by one in a gallery.

Erik Kessels—Working as an Editor, Not a “Photographer Who Does Not Photograph”

A Guardian profile presents Kessels as a major editor of found and vernacular photography and describes Useful Photography’s preference for functional imagery over art photography or documentary, citing online-auction photographs in issue 2 and livestock images in issue 5^*10. In another interview, Kessels explains his preference for constructing stories through selection, repositioning, and sequence instead of altering found photographs in Photoshop^*11. Leaving the content of a photograph unaltered is not neutrality; it is a choice to preserve the legibility of the image’s original use while changing only its relations through editing.

Manual Photographs, Livestock, Missing Persons—When the “Type” Becomes the Subject

The Guardian’s account of Aarsman’s Useful Photography lecture at the Arles photography festival presents it as an exercise in close reading of ordinary functional images^*12. Issue 9 gathers examples from photography manuals for beginners, showing how pictures created to teach correct exposure and composition also mass-produce norms of what counts as a “good photograph”^*13. Once names and claims to masterpiece status are removed, another layer of photographic history appears: visual templates used to sell products, locate people, assess cattle, prevent mistakes, or certify rituals.

The Revaluation of Vernacular Photography—and Its Risks

The Met’s 2000 exhibition of vernacular photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection indicates the contemporaneous museum reevaluation of anonymous snapshots and accidental failures^*14. TIME later discussed projects in which Kessels and others re-edited forgotten amateur photographs for new audiences^*15. Carnegie Museum of Art preserves pre-selfie self-portraits, family portraits, photomontages, and related material within a vernacular-photography collection^*16. Amon Carter Museum describes such images as records for understanding everyday life and collective memory^*17. Useful Photography participates in this reevaluation while also exposing a contradiction: once an image enters the museum, the practical use that first shaped it can begin to fade.

Photographic Significance—From a History of Masterpieces to a History of Image Systems

Foam’s profile of Erik Kessels identifies the collecting and exhibiting of album and anonymous photographs as an ongoing part of his work and names Useful Photography as one of its central projects^*18. Bibliographic records for the first four issues also confirm the continuing participation of multiple editors and the creation of a different collection of utilitarian images in each volume^*19. Useful Photography was included in Photo Art: Photography in the 21st Century, connecting it to a broader move away from contemporary photography centered exclusively on picture-taking toward collecting, editing, and publishing as forms of production^*20. The project’s contribution to photographic history extends beyond the recognition that anonymous photographs can be aesthetically interesting. It brought the systems through which photography classifies, verifies, sells, teaches, and remembers into the center of photographic inquiry. At the same time, moving photographs that have lost their original uses into art creates new value while erasing aspects of their former function. Useful Photography does not resolve that contradiction; it repeatedly stages it within the editorial form of the magazine.