Text By Ellen Gardner

Reunion pictures taken before you were born, snapshots from a long-ago summer vacation, older couples posed primly for formal portraits—chances are, you grew up with keepsakes like these. If you were lucky, someone older than you told you stories about the people in the pictures.
   But sometimes, for whatever reasons, photographs escape their albums or boxes and end up at flea markets or garage sales, priced anywhere from mere pocket change to $50 or more. Collectors paw through the cast-off snapshots hoping to find something remarkable among the commonplace. Under these circumstances, it’s up to the buyer to supply the story.

(a) If you look closely at the basket of photographs, they probably seem as if they’ve just been pulled from a shelf in your great aunt’s closet or from a corner in your mother’s basement. But all of them were culled from a flea market—pedigree unknown, subjects unidentified, and photographers anonymous.

Cameras weren’t common household items until a former bank clerk named George Eastman invented the Kodak #1 in 1888. By the early 1900s, an estimated 1.5 million amateur shutterbugs owned one of the simple box cameras. Technological innovations, such as Polaroid instant-picture cameras in the 1960s and digital technology and cell phone snapshots today, have turned photography from a posed event into a spontaneous reflection of our lives and times.
   “Don’t believe you became an artist the instant you received a gift Kodak on Christmas morning,” famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz once said. But the public keeps clicking away, and sometimes the results, known as vernacular photography, unintentionally rise to the level of art.

(b) The best “found” photographs have a way of capturing the imagination. Sometimes it’s the unintentional artistic quality of the photograph itself (as in the double exposure, left center). But more often, collectors are attracted to the mystery or timeless universality of the images.

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