Dead Ringer explores duplication in vernacular photography through carefully selected pairings of found snapshots. These photographic doubles point to the uncanny nature of repetition while inviting close attention to small but telling differences. Organized around prints made from the same negative, the exhibition brings together images that are nearly identical yet never exactly the same. 

Collected over the past decade by artists Yael Eban and Matthew Gamber, Dead Ringer investigates the vernacular photograph’s place within visual culture. Vernacular photography encompasses the vast number of images that fall outside distinct institutional categories: informal snapshots made by everyday individuals using widely available cameras, as part of an expanding consumer market that began in the late nineteenth century. Created primarily for personal use and immediate social circles, these photographs reflect a shared and accessible visual language rooted in ordinary experience.

Eban and Gamber have built this project through the careful collection of duplicate snapshots gathered from family albums, booksellers, flea markets, antique stores, estate sales, vintage dealers, and online marketplaces. As a group, these images form both a visual archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photofinishing processes, and a sociological record of how photographs create and sustain human connection.

Each pair in the exhibition originates in a single photographic moment, yet each print has followed a different material life. One photograph may have been preserved in an album, while another was carried in a wallet, displayed in a frame, folded into a box, or repeatedly handled. Over time, these divergent paths leave visible traces: fading, discoloration, creases, cropping, and other marks of use. The condition of each print, including the inscription on the back, offers clues to its history, revealing the passage of time and the effects of touch, storage, and circulation.

At its core, this exhibition returns attention to photography as a physical object. By reuniting prints made from the same negative but altered by different histories of use, Eban and Gamber challenge assumptions about originality, uniqueness, and value. In an era when images circulate endlessly as digital data, Dead Ringer insists on the photograph as something handled, exchanged, marked, and aged.

Yael Eban and Matthew Gamber’s collaborative and multidisciplinary practice investigates the role of photography in material culture, specifically focusing on mass reproduction. Both artists have worked in photography archives, which greatly informs their artistic endeavors.

Yael Eban is a visual artist working primarily with the medium of photography. She’s a 2025 recipient of a Martha Boschen Porter Fund grant through the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artsy, Collector Daily, and FADER. Eban has attended several residencies including MASS MoCA, Wassaic Project, and Vermont Studio Center. She recently served as co-director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces. For the past decade she has worked as archivist for the Peter J. Cohen Collection, a vernacular archive of over 70,000 found snapshots. 

Matthew Gamber is an Associate Professor of Photography and New Media in the Department of Visual Arts at the College of the Holy Cross, where he has also served as the Visual Arts Studio Program Coordinator. His teaching and research focus on archival practices and experimental photography, exploring the intersection of technology and art. His accolades include an Individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, a grant from the Martha Boschen Porter Fund and an Artist’s Resource Trust Grant, both through the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, a Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and a Blanche E. Colman Award.

Website

@yaeleban
@matthewgamber