Snapshots in Time: Exhibit shows artist's collection of old photos whose stories are unknown

John Foster was a child in Winston-Salem's Ardmore neighborhood when he began pursuing two of his favorite activities -- making art and collecting things. Those pursuits would prove to be defining factors in his life as he grew up to become an artist, art teacher, graphic designer and voracious collector of folk art and found objects.

Since the mid-1970s, Foster has lived in St. Louis, Mo., where he and his wife, Teenuh, have filled their home with the art and artifacts they have collected. Among those items are scores of old photographs that they have found at flea markets, at estate sales and, increasingly, on the Internet -- images that have become disconnected from their original owners and contexts. About 80 highlights from their collection of "vernacular photographs," some dating back to the early 20th century, are on view through Dec. 9 at Wake Forest University's Hanes Art Gallery in an exhibition titled "Accidental Mysteries."

Like any other viewer of these informal snapshots, accidental multiple-exposures, amateur camera pranks and anonymous studio photographs, Foster knows nothing about any of them except the information directly conveyed in them. What attracts him to these photos and lends them coherence as an exhibition are the elements of mystery and oddity that distinguish them from the run of the vernacular photographic mill.

They tend to prompt amusement, puzzlement and unanswerable questions: Why are those two men scuffling in that field? Why did that person put on a gas mask to pose for that passport-type head shot? How did that man wearing a fez come to be standing atop that telephone pole? What's that mysterious auralike glow enveloping the head of the young girl posed with her parents in their living room?

In a digital-slide lecture that Foster gave at Wake Forest in late October -- and in a more recent telephone interview -- he talked about the photographs and discussed the development of his collecting habits and his career in art, art education and graphic design.

After graduating from Reynolds High School, Foster majored in painting and drawing at East Carolina University, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1974. He moved to St. Louis soon afterward to attend graduate school at Washington University. Upon earning his master's degree there he found a job teaching art at a St. Louis prep school, where he worked for 11 years until he switched careers to become a graphic designer, his current profession.

In 1978, he met Teenuh, also a former art student, who works as a representative for advertising illustrators and commercial photographers. Married for 27 years, they have a daughter and a son, both in their early 20s.

Foster said that while he was in graduate school, he began to collect old pulleys, gears and tricycle seats -- objects that he found visually engaging without regard to their original functions. He and Teenuh started collecting contemporary art around 1980.

Initially they bought ceramic works and pieces by friends who were also artists. Then, in 1985, they were introduced to the work of Howard Finster, a retired preacher and prolific self-taught artist. Foster's purchase of several Finster paintings and his first visit to Finster's "Paradise Garden" environment in Georgia prompted the couple to make folk art the main focus of their collecting efforts through the 1990s.

Foster said that his interest in anonymous snapshots and other such vernacular photographs dates back to the early 1990s, when he started perusing stacks of old photographs at flea markets. "At first I didn't know just what it was I was looking for in these photographs," he said, but he eventually realized that e was looking for images with elements of "mystery and magic."

Around 2000, Foster began to realize that there was a growing, increasingly interconnected, international community of collectors who shared his interest in such mysterious photographs, whose context had been obscured by time and circumstance. He also discovered the emerging Internet market for vernacular photos.

By 2002, he was devoting more of his spare time acquiring these kinds of photographs, augmenting his flea-market and estate-sale finds with photos he found on e-Bay. Expanding interest in such photos among collectors has led to rising prices, Foster said, noting that some of the more unusual ones can go for $500 on the Internet. The highest price he has for a single photo paid to date, he said, has been $200.

Foster's acquisitions make for an intimately absorbing visual experience. Many of the photos are faded or overexposed, and most are no larger than a playing card, but they exert an undeniable fascination if you allow yourself a close look. To lend more variety to the show and draw viewers into it, He has included substantial enlargements of several images. Although the photographs recall bygone eras, the sensibility behind their collection is decidedly contemporary.

The exhibition originated in 2005 at the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis.

Before arriving at Wake Forest, it traveled to art institutions in Boston, Memphis and three Midwestern cities. After it closes here, it will go to Missouri State University.

"Accidental Mysteries" is on view through Dec. 9 at Wake Forest University's Hanes Art Gallery, on the campus in the Scales Fine Arts Center. For more information, call 758-5585.