Going Viral: Photography, Performance and the Everyday

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Going Viral: Photography, Performance, and the Everyday (February 6 - June 7, 2020), this catalogue celebrates the generous gift of nearly 1,000 anonymous snapshot photographs from the collection of Peter J. Cohen. Today, we use the phrase going viral to describe the rapid reception and reproduction of media on the Internet. However, since the dawn of amateur photography in the late-nineteenth century, critics have warned of a “universal snapping psychosis.” Long before the age of the selfie, the craze for candid cameras spawned innumerable tropes that snapshooters found irresistible to repeat. This publication considers our everyday relationship to photography: the ways in which we mediate, understand, and narrate our lives through the snapping and sharing of photographs, and how and why certain types of images become socially infectious. The catalogue is organized into eleven sections that explore various performances, rituals, and gestures that have gone viral via photography. In addition to an opening essay by the curator and an interview with the collector, introductory texts for each section provide micro-histories of diverse social phenomena and demonstrate how vernacular photographs might function as affective historical documents.