Photographing the banal is nothing new. It was arguably luminaries like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, back in the 1970s, who pioneered the genre. Through laser-like powers of selection, combined with vividly saturated colour, they found photographic art in the everyday things that surround us, from park benches to obsolete advertising hoardings.
Now, 50 years on, Instagram is elevating this fascination with the mundane to the mainstream. The hashtag of choice is #banalography. Search for it and you’ll get nearly a quarter of a million posts.
One enthusiastic banalographer is Tom Hicks, a librarian at Wolverhampton University, who specialises in recording images of the Black Country. I recently joined him, along with a dozen or so others, on one of his photo walks.
Inspired by his interest in typography, his…
