As the application deadline is almost here we asked the first Eidolon Grant's jury why researching, showcasing and in general, talking about everyday imaging is valuable to us as a society, and to them as professionals.

Read their inspiring answers and do not forget: the deadline is 30 August midnight!

Eidolon: As Richard Chalfen states, “the introduction of camera equipment for anyone's everyday use has been an extraordinary event, influencing the ways that people can keep track of who they are and how they have lived”. Why is showcasing, safekeeping and researching everyday photography important in your opinion, and what are the distinctive opportunities embedded in the act of looking at these photographs?

Özge Calafato: Everyday photography opens up opportunities to explore our shared social histories in their fascinating diversities and similarities. The act of looking at everyday photography lays bare the malleability of all beings and the visual archives they produce, as these cultural archives are passed on from generation to generation. It becomes a meeting point of the gaze –unstable and elusive, taking on different forms, challenging contested histories, rendering visible the intimate, the tender and the fragile. Everyday photography stands as a mirror, one we yearn for and recoil from simultaneously. Engaging with everyday photography is an attempt to think through the social, cultural, political meanings we forge, project, and disrupt. It encapsulates our modes of living, feeling, and connecting, regulated through the presence of the camera and those who wield it – whether authentic or contrived – yet always performed to varying degrees. By offering us a medium through which to reflect on time and space, on difference and similitude, everyday photography invites new – ways of building – solidarities across identities, geographies, environments, and histories.  

Mattie Colquhoun: It has been the self-elected task of writers and artists for centuries to document the present and attempt to understand the particular character of their own epoch. The coincident emergence of photography and modernism gave new precedence to the role of vernacular culture in our sense of presentness, but the sheer proliferation of photographic images presents us with innumerable problems in untangling what the nature of our present is. A culture that often deplores the prevalence of vernacular imagery unfortunately announces itself as not being up to the task. But with the implications of this cultural revolution remaining unresolved, the everyday needs our attention more than ever. There is no better and no more complicated avenue for us to explore if we want to understand who we are.

Christopher Pinney: Roland Barthes described photographs as “exorbitant” and as “crammed”, so full that nothing could be added. Siegfried Kracauer wrote about photography’s “total inventory”. Everyday photography embraces this exorbitance and totality offering access to a demotic optical unconscious: everything is there if you know what to look for. Among the ideas that motivate me are the thought (which maybe implicit in Chalfen’s observation) that photography, rather than simply confirming our vision and view of the world, extends and subverts it. “Subjunctive” performances in front of the camera find a place in “waking dreams” to recall Benjamin’s wonderful description. I’m also struck by the advantages of thinking about the “demotic” as a “more than local, less than global” alternative to the “vernacular”. Vernacularity is a linguistic metaphor that presumes localisation precipitating out of “high” language use. “Demotic” points to a subaltern commonality that I think connects many global “popular” photographic practices. The vernacular points to territories whereas the demotic point to networks. The de-localizing nature of networks also makes it easier to think about photography’s medium-specificity which remains for me an important question.

Joachim Schmid: Photography has been one of the key techniques of culture for nearly two centuries. Surprisingly only few of the technique's multifaceted forms of use and application are well researched, documented, and understood in detail. Making more photographs doesn't help understanding them. Exploring does, and the opportunities of exploration are as endless as the facets of photography. The only limit is your imagination. 

Róza Tekla Szilágyi: Though everyday photography is a medium of the millions, the anonymity of the image-makers and the depicted casts a heavy shadow of suspicion on it – as an object for study, a source of information, and a part of photographic history. The flexible and quite expressive medium of the everyday photograph produced the vast majority of our visual memories, something that can be called the “vestibule of photography” – and the heritage of the past 200 years can be depicted in this body of photographs almost without words. Despite it's importance, the mass-produced wealth of the century is quickly vanishing (into the bins or the cloud), and we – as a society – are only beginning to discover what it actually represents. Without the safekeeping hands and analytical looks we can easily forget this visual heritage of ours, and the history of everyday life, personal stories, a looking glass into the way the fine fabric of society works will disappear with it.

Get to know our jury here and read more about the application process for the Eidolon Grant here.