Going Viral: Photography, Performance, and the Everyday

This is an online exhibition from the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

Mined from the Peter J. Cohen Collection gift of nearly 1,000 anonymous snapshot photographs, this exhibition considers our everyday relationship to “viral” photography. In what ways do we mediate, understand, and narrate our lives through photographs? Why do certain types of images become socially infectious?

The title of this exhibition, Going Viral: Photography, Performance, and the Everyday, was generated over a year before the outbreak of COVID-19, a global public health crisis that has quickly altered all of our lives. The title is intended to be provocative—a comparison of our contemporary relationship to photography with that of the analog age.

Contributed by Carrie Cushman