Vernacular Photography

Found photographs in a Beijing garbage dump unveil a fading wedding rite.

Critic Lyle Rexer writes for LightBox on a mesmerizing exhibition of some 250 vintage American employee ID badges imaginatively staged at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery revealing a distant world from our own.

LightBox presents a series of unpublished photographs made by the inimitable, prolific and controversial cartoonist as source material for his drawings, a rough typology of traffic lights, power lines and other infrastructure used to fill in his bleak background reality of urban life.

Sourced from censored images of women on product packaging found on store shelves in Iran, Toledano's series highlights the absurdity of the attempt on behalf of state and religious authorities to black out, with marker in hand, one half of humanity.

Comprising found and anonymous family photo albums, Kessels' new book and exhibition is the result of nearly 15 years spent rummaging through flea markets and second-hand stores across the globe, a meditation on the nature of obsolescence and a vanishing vernacular art form.