With the advent of e-mail, social archivists are lamenting the decline of an important artifact: the hand-written letter. The study of human behavior, cultural values, and semantic developments has long depended on written correspondance as fodder for social research and analysis. As technology continues to advance the invisibility of communication, archivists must continue to shift their sites to new forms of evidence, refashioning methods of annotation. But Paul Druecke's collection of evidence suggests that innovation may take a long time to catch on.

The Milwaukee artist put out a public call for vernacular photographs just over a year ago. Currently his collection contains over 500 images, titled and untitled, old and new, from anonymous contributors to friends, family, and Milwaukee's art elite. Birthday parties for Grandma, kid's soccer games, first communion and bar mitzvahs, Christmas morning, funny hats, pets, fishing, barbecues, and bar scenes overwhelm Druecke's archive with uncanny familiarity.

So effective and simplistic is this sociological exercise in narrowing down our collective life experiences that our whole American fixation with the mythology of the individual is leveled flat. No unique moments, inventive acts,or creative gestures are bestowed for the camera. Only the predictable shades of grins inhabit these eternal stand-ins for memory.

Fashion and class mean nothing to Kodak or Polaroid. Those wide-lapel tuxedos, whether rented from Gingis Formal Wear or purchased on Madison Avenue, just can't dignify that inebriated best-man on the dance floor. Our human genres are homogenized even further by our limited photo-processing industry. With the exception of rounded corners, scalloped edges and square format prints of past decades, the standard three-by-five color print operates even more insidiously than Warhol's universal bottle of coke

Photographs number one through 343 are displayed in a continuous horizontal band that wrapped around the galleries of both spaces. The remaining 344 through 520 were presented in a photo album at the Milwaukee Institute of Art. When mounted on the walls the snapshots maintain a greater sense of focus and objectivity than they do in the album and thus their unnerving sameness is intensified. In addition to the presentation, Druecke used this opportunity to expand his archives by installing a donation box in the gallery, asking visitors to contribute one photo from their personal collection to the project.

As sociologists are forced to sample new technologies for study and prosperity, Druecke's undertaking reminds us that the color snapshot remains a fixture entrenched in America's vernacular lexicon. The ironic component to this archive is that only a sociologist could be intrigued by such boring, uninspired material. We pity the poor soul who will have to study the similarly dull stuff of a million e-mails.

Michelle Grabner is an assistant Professor of Art
at the University of Wisconsin