A note on the show:

This exhibition gathers 52 photographs collected by Joshua Willis over years of visits to flea markets, antique shops, and online archives — snapshots that once belonged to private lives, now offered to public view.

The 52 photographs gathered here were once fragments of private life: album pages, portraits on walls, records of memory. Their value was linked to moments shared with loved ones, and most meaningful to those who knew the subjects.

Collected over the past years, this selection marks a shift from private to public, from personal to anonymous, and back to personal again.

As a collection, it demonstrates both shifts in photographic convention across decades and serves as a record of the compositional instincts of various unknown makers. Seen outside the context of their personal histories, these photographs constitute an alternative, vernacular history of photography and challenge the argument that vernacular photography can only be judged in relation to utilitarian purpose.