A woman in a corseted, white-lace dress stares straight ahead as she unveils a framed funerary portrait of another young woman. This sepia-toned 19th-century photograph is historian and curator Geoffrey Batchen's choice for the very first image of "Suspending Time: Life - Photography - Death" at the Izu Museum, in Mishima.

The stiff pose, expressionless face and odd scenario is a far cry from the snapshots most of us are familiar with, where friends and family are usually smiling for the camera or caught in a candid moment. But they are of the same genre: vernacular photography — pictures of everyday life taken by amateur or unknown photographers.

Today, digital cameras have ignited an explosion in vernacular photography. We see thousands of examples posted online on Flickr and Facebook; we e-mail and tweet them with the click of a button. They verify our existence, reminding us, and showing others, what we are doing and where we have been. But they also foreshadow our limited time on Earth — just like the image of the woman in white, which Batchen notes in the exhibition catalog, "offers a quite extraordinary proposition: that photography can be used against itself to depict an eternal afterlife."