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During the postwar economic boom, the American market was flooded with amateur cameras. While designed primarily to record domestic life, these cameras have become so ubiquitous that today we expect almost any event, from a family vacation to an act of police brutality, to have been captured on film or video. These moments where everyday citizen becomes accidental journalist highlight the democratic possibility of vernacular cameras to capture unofficial and uncensored records of history. Yet citizen photojournalism is also part of a broader epistemological shift in our perception of history. Such images not only offer evidence of what happened, they also situate the viewer as a citizen witness to history and thus encourage a "first person" affective response. To examine this shift, I focus on the urtext of citizen photojournalism: Abraham Zapruder's home movie of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In contrast to the standard journalistic or forensic camera image, the vernacular Zapruder film offers a more participatory relation to history, but one that is also more subjective. This essay will explore three distinct iterations of the Zapruder film: in the pages of Life magazine, in the irreverent and humorous 1975 performance/video artwork Eternal Frame , and in the experiential museum display of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Each instance engages with amateurs and their cameras in distinct and revealing ways and draws attention to our evolving perception of citizen photojournalism as both empirical evidence and an experiential framework for feeling history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]