Degrees of mystery: who, what, and why

All snapshots are mysterious. All snapshots benefit from mystery, and the more mysterious they are, the more they benefit. If we think about the information it contains, looking at a single snapshot is like reading the one page remaining from a lost diary. To begin with, someone else’s family photo isn’t our business, of course; no one ever imagined it would be, and no one thought we ought to have things spelled out for us. Even if we imagine all the pictures ever taken by a given camera, or all the pictures ever taken of a given family, a great deal of information is simply assumed. But let’s suppose the full story could be read in all those pictures in the aggregate: in any one picture it will inevitably be very attenuated indeed. And very often all we have is one picture. So there’s a certain amount of mystery in any snapshot, though it is usually subtle. Who were these people, we might ask, and how were they related to the snapshooters, if we didn’t feel these were pointless questions for our purposes. Mystery at low concentrations is just the absence of irrelevant detail. The loss of information is beneficial. I’ve noticed that when I look at my own family’s snapshots, the ones in my parents’ house, it’s difficult to pull them out of context the way I want to do as a collector. If I recognize myself or a family member or someone I know in a photo, it will still function as it was originally meant to, and that isn’t compatible with what I’m trying to do with it now. I can’t make it even a little bit mysterious. A greater loss of context provokes the stronger question, “What’s going on here?” On occasion I’ve fortuitously found out what was happening in a picture that I thought could never be “understood.” Again that was a misfortune for it. Mysteries are good for the imagination, at least as long as they seem permanent. Most extremely, there are snapshots that make us wonder why on earth they were taken at all (in this case the seemingly arbitrary red mark adds more of the same kind of mystery and makes the photo intensely beautiful, to my way of thinking). I prize these perhaps most of all mystery photos. I stress that (unlike “What’s going on here”) it’s a question that can only sensibly arise in snapshots. Asked of a mysterious art photo, for example, it would be silly. A mysterious art photo was taken to be mysterious and to be art.

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