[8][9] However, vernacular photography is generally discussed and exhibited as a group of related photographic genres meant to be studied or appreciated just as they are or were, without taking the photos out of their original historical contexts or giving them new aesthetic meaning.
Without discounting the importance of the constitutive social and technical factors that motivate this class of photographic object into being, we must grant that there is a fascination to certain examples that allows them a kind of afterlife, a license to circulate in other contexts.
When the snapshot becomes “anonymous”—when the family history ends and the album surfaces at a flea market, photographic fair, or historical society—and the image is severed from its original, private function, it also becomes open, available to a range of readings wider than those associated with its conception.
The collecting community around New York’s Chelsea Flea Market has been documented in a film, Other People's Pictures, by Lorca Shepperd and Cabot Philbrick.
[33] Found photography as a conspicuous art-world phenomenon has been largely limited to the United States; all major snapshot exhibitions have been mounted in American museums (in addition to the museum shows mentioned above, John Foster’s Accidental Mysteries,[34] a self-curated traveling show, deserves mention).
But the Internet has facilitated the growth of an international scene, permitting the exchange of ideas and photos beyond local flea markets and the like; eBay, Instagram, and especially Facebook are home to a lively global found-photo community.