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Mounted in conjunction with Going Viral: Photography, Performance, and the Everyday, this exhibition tells an earlier history of vernacular photography—that of 19th-century portraiture. Similar to snapshots, the portrait photograph is enigmatic for its ability to be a one-of-a-kind object (a family keepsake) and a duplicate (a repetition of conventional settings, poses, and framing devices) all at once. However, before photographs were taken or snapped, they were made. Early photography was a process that involved a great deal of time, labor, and costly materials. Thus, this exhibition explores the materiality, the craft, and the event of photography in its earliest iterations.

Curated by Carrie Cushman, Linda Wyatt Gruber ’66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography.