Size

I couldn’t help making a certain analogy with art photography when I noticed that first snapshot, and you will inevitably do the same if you are willing to find aesthetic value in snapshots (though you will start from your own understanding of art photography and your own tastes). Your openness to that analogy is your willingness to find aesthetic value in snapshots. But the analogy has to be kept loose at certain points, because snapshots and art photos are very different animals. For example, consider the factor of size. Snapshots are small—a lot smaller than most art photos. The word “snapshot” means different things to different people, of course. There are photographers for whom a snapshot is a picture taken in a certain style (the style or one of the styles that art photographers learned or adapted from the snapshooters). But other photographers use the word the way collectors do, which is the same as the way the snapshooters did. For the snapshooters, snapshots were those little photos that they took with their own cameras, picked up at the drugstore, and pasted into photo albums or dumped into shoeboxes and forgot about. They were a class of concrete objects. Is there a neat formula for that class? We might want to find a way to include photobooths and whatnot, but perhaps we can say that a snapshot in the strictest sense is any photo taken with a snapshot camera; there were no snapshots before the first Kodak was introduced in 1888. In the normal order of things snapshots were processed in commercial labs. Formats were limited by camera design—by the film that had to be used. And the prints were small, the better to go in albums, wallets, and so forth, and probably also to comport with their poor technical quality, which wouldn’t have stood up to enlargement. Although darkroom enlargements were sometimes attempted anyway, an enlargement of a snapshot is not a snapshot. It is an enlargement of a snapshot. So let’s agree: snapshots aren’t just small, but small by definition. In art photography (and in art more broadly), size is a variable, something the artist can play with: it has meaning. But size didn’t mean anything to the snapshooters. Snapshots were just small, and that was the end of it. Does snapshot size mean anything to us? By contrast with other kinds of photography it may connote a sort of modesty, as all the limited technical means and sensory effects of snapshots tend to do. Is there more to it than that? Snapshot dimensions do force our hand in certain respects. We may want a nice picture by some set of standards we probably learned from art photography, but the technical limitations of snapshots have to be accepted. And once we accept what snapshots can’t do, we have to accept what snapshots can’t do well. The canvas is limited. In order to be graphically effective from our point of view, a snapshot can’t have a lot going on in it—we can’t think of it as just a large picture on a small scale. You can never study a snapshot the way you might study a Gursky. So to get the most out of snapshots we must first face the facts about them; a good snapshot must somehow make up in graphic punch for what it can’t accommodate in centimeter-by-centimeter incident. But does that mean the small size of snapshots is no more than something we have to make the best of? No. A good snapshot actually takes advantage of its limitations. This little picture (actual size 1⅞” by 2⅜”) uses its size for rhetorical purposes, so to speak, and would lose some of its power at a larger scale. A snapshot may be small, but it can be correspondingly intense. And a very small snapshot can be very intense. Yes: within its limited range, snapshot size does have meaning for us, just the way color or any other snapshot variable does. So in this respect we are unlike the snapshooters and like art photographers. That may seem obvious, since it’s right next door to the analogy I mentioned at the beginning, but it’s the thin end of a less obvious wedge.