The section titles are clickable links.
No. 1
This is the first snapshot I noticed. I found it in 1982, in an antique shop on Judah Street in San Francisco. Until that moment I’d never imagined it was possible to see a snapshot as something other than just someone’s family photo. How did I see it? At the time I couldn’t have said. The picture simply moved me, and I bought it. From this vantage point I can say I didn’t see that original snapshot as an art photo. I knew it was, precisely, someone’s family photo, possibly taken during a European vacation. But it had some qualities that were a lot like the art photography I knew. More than that, it had acquired them accidentally, as far as I could tell. In a sense it was better than an art photo, than any art photo, because it left room for me. It was letting me be the one to notice it and elevate it. It was letting me make it completely mine. Even now I think this is a remarkable and baffling image, with its jigsaw puzzle of uninterpretable shadows and highlights, its refusal to map into a plausible three-dimensional scene, and, most thrillingly, the ambiguously laden gesture of the subject at left, suggesting grief or shame or self-defense but possibly only a hand raised against glare. That wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to make the picture more like an art photo, and I cut the quarter-inch borders off it. I didn’t understand anything about snapshots. |
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Objects and time
Back when photography was a “minor art,” I remember hearing it said that a photo could only be a shallower sort of thing than, for example, a painting, in the way it occupied time. The idea was that the time visibly spent by the artist on a handmade object such as a painting was to some extent mirrored, recapitulated, in the time spent on it by the viewer; whereas you could get a photograph in an instant because it had been made in an instant, or seemed to have been. And that was not good, not good at all. Well, there are exceptions, and even when it’s true it’s not completely true, but we can see the force of it. An art photo is not usually made to be an object. It’s made to be an image. And an image, an abstraction brought to the eye by an object, has no history and no age. In the extreme case of pixels on a screen, there really is no object at all. Like anything else, a photograph needs extension in space in order to have extension in time. Apart from a few cases of assertive boundary-pushing like the deliberately distressed photos of Doug and Mike Starn, art photos aren’t physically worked in the sense that a painting is, and they tend to be shielded from anything that time might do to them. In its uneasy relationship with its existence as an object, an art photo is something like an LP, and any signs of age it may have picked up in spite of everything are like surface noise: mere degradation, a distraction from the disembodied ideal. A snapshot is not like that at all. It’s just a piece of paper too, but—if we are open to this aspect of it—it’s more like a painting than an art photo is: its tangibility and its malleability actually do some work. Taken seriously as an object, a snapshot has a historical depth that an art photo doesn’t have (and doesn’t want to have). For one thing, a snapshot very often looks its age. It has lived. Its life as an object goes back to the very event it is showing us, or a little later, and, unlike an art photo, it tells us so directly: it was there, so to speak. In a way it’s nice when you find a snapshot that wasn’t as neglected and kicked around as most, but a mint-condition snapshot sacrifices a certain historical density. A second point: at least until about 1980, snapshots usually have borders—a quarter of an inch or so of white paper surrounding the image, giving the ensemble some integrity as an object (we would notice if a slice of it was gone). From our point of view here in the present, the border also certifies the snapshooter’s original framing, attests to the composition as an on-the-spot event—which, of course, takes us back instantly to that spot, that event. Although an art photo can have a border, I don’t think it is usually integral. And the framing of an art photo speaks only to the compositional intention of the photographer at some stage in the making of the print. It doesn’t usually put us in mind of the photographer snapping the shutter. Finally, it’s clear that, although people generally experience art photos as images to be looked at, they know snapshots as things to be owned and touched. We have all held them in our hands, arranged them in photo albums, turned them over to see what might have been written on the back; if we took them ourselves, we have picked snapshots up at the drugstore or printed them on our computers. The history of our families is enshrined in these objects. When we value, as objects, old photos of ancestors we may never have met, it’s because we value our history itself; whereas we probably value an art photo merely as an image. Book designers and curators often haven’t realized that a snapshot is an object all the way down and all the better for being one. Just as I did, they tend to want to assimilate snapshots to art photos, either by hiding the borders or by displaying examples that are unrealistically perfect. And when we print snapshots in books or hang them on the walls of a museum or gallery, we probably aren’t thinking about their original function, a function that was very much bound up with their existence as objects. We have no way of actually recovering what they originally did for anyone, of course. But it seems to me that an awareness of the fact of their past lives as objects can only deepen them. |
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Truth and mystery
We don’t doubt a snapshot. A snapshot tells us how it was. We don’t doubt a snapshot because we understand the spirit in which it was taken. We understand that it was taken with no thought to an audience—a consumership—even if the shot was in some sense an experiment. More than any other kind of photo, a snapshot is something we feel we must trust: it lacks the extra layer of fishy complication that intrudes itself when a photo (or anything else) is made to be put before the public. Within its technical limits, a snapshot shows us something that actually happened, not someone’s selective and considered version of what happened. It wasn’t intended for the ages, but it wasn’t tailored for them either. A snapshot is nearly as true in this sense as a surveillance video, and it exhibits the same tradeoff between truth and technical adequacy. The obvious fact that its technical values are just barely up to the job is of course part of what tips us off that it is true, that we can trust it. But if, having invested all that trust, we encounter something mysterious in a snapshot, now we have to take it seriously as a true mystery. It’s not just mystification. No one concocted it, no one was interested in mood or effect; the picture is just a record. A snapshot tells us how it was, but—what was that, exactly? You may say that this kind of mystery is not the pleasurable mystery of art, but the aesthetically neutral mystery of history, science, or crime—not atmosphere, but simply the absence of complete information. The itch for the full story would indeed be out of place, but we have no such itch; we are luxuriating in speculation. A snapshot mystery is a mystery that can never be solved, that we know can never be solved. But it is very much stronger, realer, than the make-believe mystery of a Gregory Crewdson, say, which can only evoke a make-believe bafflement. The irony is that an avowed work of imagination like one of Crewdson’s imprisons the speculative faculty in pointless thoughts about the artist’s intention, whereas the businesslike snapshot sets the imagination free. This effect is unique to snapshots, I believe. Nothing else has such an utterly documentary spirit so sloppily expressed. Unlike the cooked-up mysteries of art, snapshot mysteries are real mysteries. There is no cuteness in snapshots, no deliberate obscurity; no unanswerable questions are being posed, because no questions are being posed at all. If there are questions in our minds nonetheless, it’s not because we’re wondering about something an artist wants us to wonder about. We’re curious about something that actually happened. This paradoxical collision of very mysterious mystery and very factual facts is something I like a great deal in snapshots. |
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Snapshot technology: color
Competing snapshot color processes could coexist, but they all had limited lifetimes. A given process or version of a given process would be introduced abruptly, last perhaps a decade, and then be discontinued abruptly. Old color is gone forever. It doesn’t amount to a manner—a style we might be able to shoot in now, sentimentally or ironically, the way musicians might play in the styles of bygone eras. Old color is tied to old technology, which is outmoded and stays that way. Once more snapshot photography is unlike art photography, which lives in a less instantaneous technical present and thus has many more options; any popular market tends to be severely confined by recently made corporate decisions. William Eggleston, for example, has used dye transfer color since the early 1970s, and his palette has looked about the same since then. Snapshot color is more like movie color, which can’t afford to stand still but at any given moment tends to put all its eggs in one basket. And, as with movie color, the result for us, after enough time has gone by, is that each color process (and the look of the characteristic chemical degradation each color process is prey to) tends to evoke an era, to have a period feeling of its own. Just as that very specific Technicolor of the classical Technicolor westerns, encountered elsewhere, might make us think of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the precise look of any of the steps in the evolution of the Kodacolor process will take us back to the years when that look was the only color look there was. The snapshooters mostly couldn’t control their own pictures. That was part of the deal. The democratization of photography didn’t mean that ordinary people had more choice; just the opposite. Ordinary people could have photography on condition that they not have very much of it. Color was one of the many aspects of photography that they handed over to impersonal forces. A snapshot camera was a piece of popular technology, in this regard much like a car: highly commercial, evanescent, with ever-evolving components, and designed to give the consumer only so many variables to play with. The people who took snapshots probably didn’t always know just what kind of color they were going to get when they picked up their pictures at the drugstore, and they may not have liked it when they eventually saw it. But most likely they simply accepted it as the state of the art. The same conclusions apply to most other technical aspects of snapshot photography. |
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Tinting
Before the color era, hand-coloring or tinting was often added to photographs of all kinds; it’s a little hard to keep in mind now that tinting was intended not as some sort of effect, but as a way to make photos more realistic. Any dated color process will stand out for us, but the case of tinting goes a bit further. Especially now that its realism has receded, tinting tends to read as an extra layer of surface working and thus adds that much more complexity to our response. Techniques that effectively “slow down” the perception of photographs are rare in any register of the medium. In snapshots, tinting can be skillful, or it can be a rough-and-ready affair. It often seems so characterful that it brings the world of the snapshooters close to us in a way that a photograph alone would have trouble doing. And it can produce a wonderful incongruity: if we are interested in things only snapshots can give us, as I am, here is one. The person who tinted a photo is not necessarily the person who took it, and even if they are the same person, there are obviously different skills involved in taking a presentable picture and executing a presentable tint job. Perhaps more importantly, “skills” can do only so much with snapshot photography, whereas tinting can be more of an artist’s medium. Often it’s just as if some sophisticated studio overdubbing were somehow superimposed on a low-fidelity sound recording; the ensemble is a hard layer of clear intention overlain on a soft layer of unclear intention. It becomes very difficult to know what to call the result, especially if we are worried about the sense in which it might be art. The first example is just such a case: a skilled tint job on top of an ordinary snapshot. You might think that such a capable tinter wouldn’t have been interested in a picture that wasn’t even completely in focus. Is the object as a whole, the combination of photo plus tinting, the intentional art of the person or persons who created it? Probably not. Conversely, tinting can seem to be much cruder than the photo. In the second example the color on the face is like a make-up job applied by a child. But of course the seeming (relative) competence of the underlying photo can be completely factitious. Again I see no reason to believe this is anyone’s intentional art, as opposed to a somewhat ill-advised attempt to “finish” the photo, an attempt that happens to make an interesting impression now. In the last example, photo and tinting meld: they seem to be a rough match in general care and skill. What exactly was intended here? I found the picture pasted into an album of otherwise very ordinary family snapshots. There was one other largish tinted shot, but it was ordinary too. I saw no external evidence of an artist or artists at work. As for the evidence of the photo itself: the oddest thing about it is the selective and unrealistic application of color. Not all areas are tinted, and color values are washed out, with the relative exception of the swimsuited bottom at center. The tinter tinted what seemed important to him or her, and the more important, the stronger the color. That correlation strikes me as probably unconscious. |
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The intrusive camera
People in snapshots aren’t necessarily friendly to the camera. They wear expressions of surprise, dismay, anger, embarrassment, they cover their faces or the lens, they make “go away” gestures (or ruder ones), and so on. Such images are essentially missing from documentary art photography. The reason is that documentarists have no interest in challenging reality. They are, precisely, engaged in documenting it—in recording a world that may or may not include themselves but that in any case is not provoked by their presence, at least as far as they allow us to see. Until fairly recently, documentary art photographers would never have conceded their own presence at all. They would have tried to limit what they showed us, what they were officially aware of, to a world that would have been absolutely the same even if they had not been there to record it. Photographers like Lee Friedlander—very much influenced by snapshot photography—put an end to that. Friedlander shows us his image in the world. But he still does not show us conflict between himself and the world. This prohibition has the force of a taboo. Even a radically intrusive photographer like Mark Cohen, who literally shoves his camera in strangers’ faces, does not show us conflict between himself and the world: he denies his own intrusiveness. It’s a taboo that a photographer like Garry Winogrand seems to be itching to break. But the true exceptions actually prove the rule, I believe. For example, Robert Frank’s shot of a hostile African-American couple in a San Francisco park is probably intended to carry a specifically racial meaning. Whatever the truth of that moment may have been, Frank wouldn’t have been interested in showing us people offended merely by his presence as a photographer. The camera is a significant participant in snapshot photography because the people who use snapshot cameras are themselves significant participants in the life being photographed and have no reason to pretend otherwise. We said that snapshot photography is impersonal in some of its aspects, and yet here it is more personal than documentary photography, with its “scientific” remit; documentary photography is made by artists, yet in this sense it is less personal than the snapshots made by non-artists. How can we sort this out? When we call snapshot photography impersonal, we mean that part of its ultimate effect, the part that comes from its formal and technical properties, is to a great extent guided by forces other than the intentions of the people who made them, or perhaps we should say initiated them. Control is poor; the pictures get away from the snapshooters and acquire their own virtues. But when we call it personal, we mean that the initiator is an actor, not a professional observer. The point of view of a snapshot is personal, but the formal character of the picture is not. A documentary photograph is usually the other way around. The example shown here could only be a snapshot, but a “third person” intrusion—a photo of another photographer interfering with life around him or her—would at least not be a contradiction in terms in documentary art photography. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. A view of an unwelcome photographer would still seem to be a comment on the shot itself. |
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“Innocence”
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“Innocence is the quintessence of the snapshot,” Lisette Model believed. “The snapshot has no pretense or ambition. . . The picture isn’t straight. It isn’t done well. It isn’t composed. It isn’t thought out.” In fact snapshots are so innocent—innocent of pretense, ambition, concern with formal matters, all the things that art photos are presumably guilty of—that they are “closer to truth” than any other photographic images, she thought. In a similar vein, Stephen Shore feels that “the mediating voice of the artist” somehow distorts experience—mucks up the plain reality that we see without a camera and that a non-artist like a snapshot photographer is able to capture in what Shore calls the “undetermined image.” But nowadays “everyone has been so educated visually, and. . . people are striving so hard to make ‘good’ pictures, that it’s very hard to find that quality of the undetermined image.” Shore once tried to shoot like a snapshooter himself, to unlearn all his skills and all the conventions of his own brand of art photography in order to arrive at something more like what we actually see. A snapshot really is about its subject. We sense that unmistakably because the “treatment,” the formal part of the photo that an artist would care about, is so clearly beside the point in most cases. This is probably what Model means when she says a snapshot’s deficiencies bring it closer to truth. Model’s use of the word “innocence” seems to imply that she, who speaks of snapshots as though it’s someone else who takes them, and we, who are reading her words, are something other than innocent—“sophisticated,” perhaps. “Innocent” for Model and “undetermined” for Shore really mean “devoid of art manner,” which of course snapshots are, because (at least until someone finds them) they’re not art. Should artists really yearn for photos devoid of art manner? Well, they can yearn. But it seems clear that Shore’s project was doomed from the start, because an artist can never be innocent. An artist who is trying to take pictures that are only about their subject won’t get beyond taking pictures that are about being only about their subject. An artist qua artist can never be innocent, but artists are not always “on.” In my experience art photographers’ snapshots—that is, their family photos—usually look pretty much like anyone else’s. Everyone knows what snapshots are for. They have a function that is not the function of art; they have occasions that are not the occasions of art. So to say that snapshots are innocent is not a statement about the snapshooters. It is a statement about the purpose of snapshots, and that is why an art photo can go only so far in emulating snapshots. In this example the snapshooter tells us a good deal more about his relationship with the subject than he surely intended. The unconsciousness of his self-revelation of course makes the photo far more devastating than it would otherwise have been. Not at all incidentally, the snapshooter unwittingly made room for his own shadow in the composition, thereby bringing the picture even closer to truth. |
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Relationships
Everyone notices snapshot intimacy. The snapshot eye’s easy infiltration into the most private zones entranced one faction of 1960s “snapshot aesthetic” photographers; Diane Arbus, for example, worked hard to replicate the intimacy that snapshots achieved without any effort at all. The snapshot eye doesn’t stand on ceremony. It’s on first-name terms with people, because its roles are those of the inner circle: it’s a family chronicler, a dutiful witness, a snoop, a pest, a friend, a lover, and more. And because it lives on the inside, it has the inside dirt. A snapshot already knows things about its subject, whereas a more formal photo labors to discover them. When it comes to psychological attunement, snapshots have it all over even the most serious portraiture. Apart from home movies, which are functionally just snapshots many times a second, there’s not much in other media that gives us the same feeling of privileged access. Diaries and letters come the closest, perhaps. But if snapshot intimacy is so striking to us, it’s because we can’t help comparing snapshots to professional photographs, which were always more formal until snapshots taught them otherwise (and usually still are); there isn’t anything professional and more formal to compare diaries and letters to. Why did such a thing appear in photography? Obviously because the snapshot camera had a different kind of user, who had a different kind of relationship with the subject. Snapshot intimacy is not a style: it reflects something real. What Arbus did to bring intimacy into her pictures was to actually get to know her subjects the way snapshooters know theirs. A snapshot is free to reflect precisely the degree of intimacy of the real-life situation that produced it. Another kind of photo will not usually be founded on a personal relationship at all, but in any case it will not be free to reflect one, even if the camera is fully portable and can in principle follow the subject anywhere. A professional photo, whether it’s an art photo, a commercial portrait, a mugshot, or something else, generally has no reason to penetrate a life the way a snapshot does, and the shoot is like a visit from a plumber or to a lawyer: a regular part of the photographer’s life, perhaps, but no one else’s. Unlike the typical snapshot relationship, the professional photographer’s relationship with the subject is a nonce relationship if it is one at all. It didn’t exist before the shoot and will not continue later. But consider the case of someone like Charles Dodgson. Dodgson was never a professional photographer; he was a gentleman–experimenter in an era when such a thing was possible. There was no professional barrier between him and his young subjects, who were often “child-friends” with a presence in his life outside the shoot, so in some ways he was like a snapshot photographer. Nevertheless, his pictures still could not represent his relationships directly in a snapshot-like way. They were governed by the conventions of Victorian portraiture, and the unwieldiness of the equipment doubly ensured that the picture-taking was not well integrated into the lives: it was extra, so to speak, confined to special occasions designed for it. By contrast, a snapshot can depict, from the inside, an actual episode from an ongoing relationship. It can be an episode from an ongoing relationship. At this point we get into some very snapshotty territory. The snapshot camera, unlike any other camera, is an ordinary part of ordinary people’s lives, and actually accomplishes ordinary things between them—just as a household object like a frying pan or a telephone does, with the obvious difference that a camera records the moment in which it does what it does (namely, recording the moment) and we have a chance to see what happened. Like a meal or a conversation, the act of taking a snapshot can be an everyday personal transaction; other kinds of photos don’t work that way. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this picture is as spontaneous as it looks and that it’s not a self-portrait. As in the “intrusive camera” example, the subject has apparently overwhelmed the snapshooter—in real life as well as in the photo; this couldn’t happen in a professional shoot—and has to some extent taken control of the shot. The picture mirrors an episode in a real, fluid, two-way relationship and is ultimately part of it in a way that a more “authorial” photo could never be. The same is subtly true of most snapshots of people. |
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Nudity
Nudity is powerful. I suppose we all feel its power, though we may not want to feel it or want to see nudity in a picture. It goes without saying that nudity is powerful partly because sex is powerful. But another reason it’s powerful, and one of the reasons it has always interested artists, is that it exposes more than just a body. The naked body is expressive of more than itself; its defenselessness brings us closer to the person inhabiting it. In its paradoxically powerful vulnerability, nudity is not unlike art itself when it is the most worthy of our respect. I imagine the artists themselves usually make this connection and are identifying with their nude subjects at one level or another. The nudity of pornography doesn’t have a lot of this kind of power. The same goes for excessively beautified nudity in any form. In the same way that a too-perfect face stops being expressive and is effectively a mask, a too-perfect body is a suit of armor. Another problem with pornography (as opposed to sexuality) is something like the problem with comedy (as opposed to humor). Pornography is aimed directly at us: it has a commercial reason for trying to evoke one very specific response. For those of us who most value cultural products without so easily expressed a purpose and who don’t like being solicited, pornography is something to be resisted. Nudity in snapshots is never pornographic, even when the intention is in some sense sexual: with snapshots we’re in an entirely nonprofessional and noncommercial world. A snapshot of a naked person is still in every way a snapshot and conforms to every generalization we can make about snapshots. So although deliberate self-display can be seen in snapshots, often full of vanity and attempted glossiness in imitation of true pornography, the show is not for our benefit. Snapshots don’t know about us and they don’t intend to titillate us (though they can, of course). Pornography is all about money; the sex is just a way to earn it. But even the filthiest snapshot has nothing to do with money. Snapshot sex and snapshot nudity are about sex and nudity. Snapshot nudity is snapshot intimacy taken to an extreme. The vulnerability of snapshot nudity is extreme too, it seems to me, because its publication is a poignant accident of a kind that can’t happen in another medium: a snapshot nude takes a very private situation and, by bringing us on it, makes it anything but private. I might say that snapshot nudity is nuder than nudity in photography usually is, because no one thought we would see what we see; the behavior of people in snapshots is that much more unself-conscious and revealing, and we are aware that we are getting a privileged view of something completely private. And so we may feel a little bad for looking, in a way that we do not in the case of nudity intentionally exposed to us. The other side of the heightened particularity of the traditional nude figure is of course its universality. But here again, snapshot nudity is nuder. It makes no attempt to generalize: with rare exceptions, there is no iconic human form in snapshots. That’s because, as found, snapshots just aren’t art. There’s nothing iconic at all in snapshots; everything is specific. A naked person in a snapshot really is that person and can’t hide behind the fig leaf of some grand idea. |
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Taste in snapshots; rarity
Until now I have spoken of snapshots as if they were mere phenomena, objects from the past with certain properties, like archaeological specimens. Well, snapshots do have “certain properties,” but in the end that’s not really the point. For me there are snapshots that matter and snapshots that don’t matter. I am not an academic. I want a picture that is nice by my lights, as do collectors generally, although what we mean by “nice” varies considerably. And, although snapshots as mere phenomena are unimaginably plentiful, nice snapshots, whatever our personal definition may be, are rare. Almost always, a snapshot is just a boring view of a banal subject. Depending on where we enter the snapshot economy, we may or may not have an accurate idea of just how rare any kind of nice snapshot is. Snapshots that might matter to us become increasingly concentrated (and increasingly expensive) as we move up the supply chain from picker to über-picker to dealer to über-dealer. But at the bottom of the chain the truth is inescapable to any reasonably directed collector: there are very many snapshots, but very few that matter. If a snapshot is made up of a subject and a view of it—again, I would say “treatment” if that didn’t imply someone doing the treating—it’s the view that is partly out of the control of the snapshooter. And that lack of control is usually what creates the appeal of the view. The effect would not be large if there were not so many snapshots: a problem with framing or focus or development or anything else in the snapshot process will probably just further degrade an already low-grade photo. But by any reckoning the number of snapshots is very great, certainly in the many billions (though a high percentage of them will never find their way into the “snapshot economy,” will never have a chance to be seen as anything but family photos). So the number of felicitous accidents becomes non-negligible, though still very small. I find this a wonderful picture. To me it is about unease: that is what I read in the majestic awkwardness of this Harold Lloyd–like everyman in (what are probably) his new clothes and (what is probably) his new suburb. But what it seems to “be about” is an artifact. A beautiful artifact, but an artifact. I chose this example because the subject is as banal as could be. And this is a boring view of it, except for one tiny, tiny respect. The camera caught this young man at a fortunate instant, when, perhaps, he hadn’t yet completely settled himself for the shot. And if we care to look at this photo the way we look at an entirely intentional photo, we are automatically inclined to generalize: to apprehend his unsettled state metaphorically. If we imagine the stream of shutter-speed-length instants that went by while the snapshooter was holding the camera but before and after the shutter actually snapped, we can begin to see how unlikely this shot is. I’ve often seen photos of people in their yards, but never one that let me misinterpret it the way I have to misinterpret this one. Can something so thoroughly banal be called a freak? This photo is a banal freak. The same could be said of most nice snapshots. |
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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. |
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Control
Even now a snapshot camera is not a precision instrument. There’s a lot you can fiddle with if you’re brave, but not much you can actually control. At the beginning of the classical snapshot period you usually couldn’t even frame the shot (as opposed to centering the subject). Once you got through not being able to control your shot, you consigned the film to an anonymous and standardless lab and couldn’t control its development and printing. The only thing you could really control in the whole process was the subject. And that was fine. Snapshot photography was all about the subject. The snapshooters didn’t chafe at the uncontrollability of snapshot cameras; they’d willingly given up control—not that most people ever really wanted it anyway—in exchange for simplicity, for the ability to get a rough record of the subject without having to think about it too much. That was the original bargain offered by Kodak and eagerly accepted by millions upon millions of people who, you would have to say, weren’t interested in photography in and of itself. Were there exceptions? Were there people who at least tried to “do something” with snapshot photography? There must have been, and in fact we’ll come to some marginal cases. But by and large snapshot photography was too primitive for that. Even supposing you did your best to turn it to some (more or less) artistic purpose, your efforts would be largely thwarted, and hidden from us today, by the low fidelity and the massive variability built into the system. So clear examples of snapshot artists are essentially absent from the corpus. A world in which snapshot results faithfully expressed snapshot intentions would be a different world. In that world, snapshot photography would have room for a naïve or folk photography corresponding to other kinds of naïve or folk art. But that world is not our world. In our world, impersonal forces to a great extent wrested control of snapshot photography away from the snapshooter, and they are responsible for creating what we like. Even when a snapshot seems just nice to us, it was in fact the lucky beneficiary of a series of favorable accidents. Probably no one gave it much help in avoiding the unfavorable accidents that hurt so many other snapshots. They just didn’t happen this time. |
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The family
The very first Kodak ads made the bare-bones point that snapshot cameras were simple and easy to use. Next came ads featuring women and children (“Let the children Kodak”), the part of the consumership that would presumably care most about simplicity and ease of use; men barely figured at all. By 1910, the family was explicitly appearing in the advertising. “Make Kodak your family historian,” the copy urged. The family (or the couple) was the natural audience for snapshot cameras, and it was their natural subject. The snapshot camera was a small appliance that fit into “the home” but could travel, like an alarm clock, say; and it served the inhabitants of the home, the family, in a similar way. Kodak tried to get people to take cameras everywhere, but it couldn’t have imagined a world like ours, in which we actually do. Today, when everyone who carries a phone is also carrying a camera, the camera is a fully personal device, less like a clock and more like a watch. It is less anchored in the home and thus its natural subject is less centered around the family. The family is the core subject of snapshots, and, certainly as represented in snapshots, it’s a banal one. For the most part snapshots are a bottomless pile of babies, birthdays, and beaches. But that doesn’t really matter to snapshot collectors, because they aren’t primarily interested in the subject. They are interested in the formal features of snapshot photography. To the snapshooters, of course, “banality” would have been an intrusion from another frame of reference. I don’t want to hear a gourmet’s opinion of my breakfast, and the snapshooters wouldn’t have cared to have aesthetic terms applied to their family photographs. The family is a banal subject, but it is also a sensational subject, because the family is a private realm. In the hands of an art photographer like Nicholas Nixon, the family does not seem sensational; Nixon is our friendly guide to his family. He is showing it to us and seems sane, so it must be all right for us to see it. But popular morality is sometimes offended by someone like Sally Mann, who deliberately gets our goat by going where perhaps even a parent shouldn’t go and daring to broadcast what she finds there. Snapshot collectors confront a similar taboo: we see what no one said we could see and show what no one said we could show. When we appropriate people’s family photos, we are doing something not too far from rummaging through their trash or reading their mail, or so it might be felt. I suppose every serious snapshot collector has met someone who believes we are crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed—who thinks family memorabilia are sacrosanct and should not be poked into even after the families themselves are gone. It’s impossible to know how widespread that feeling is and thus how damaging it is to a broader acceptance of snapshot photography. Is the natural barrier around the nuclear family also a barrier to a recognition of what we do? Of course, you could also look at snapshot photography as a window onto an otherwise invisible aspect of life—as indispensable evidence of a side of things we know is universal yet have never really seen beyond our own experience. In particular, it’s very hard to get a first-hand angle on family life in other times and places. Aren’t snapshots valuable from this point of view? Perhaps our awareness that our own family is the only one we’ve ever had a chance to truly know is just what makes some of us feel families should be opaque. Normally our knowledge of what goes on inside family units is like our knowledge of what goes on in bathrooms—extraordinarily vivid as brought to us by our own senses in our own personal environments, but very vague otherwise. Is the family really so private that looking at other people’s family photos must always be like peeking through a keyhole? Evidently it’s a bit touchy, but I’m one of those for whom the pictures themselves outweigh everything. There is just nothing like these images, and the thrill of the forbidden might even be a good counterbalance to the banality of the family as a subject. |
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Style: poses and posing
Snapshots were not intended as art, but that doesn’t mean there was no such thing as style in snapshots. I don’t want to say that snapshot style was conscious, or as conscious as aesthetic styles are. Nevertheless, if the history of art is in one sense a history of style, the history of snapshot photography can be viewed the same way. Style in snapshot photography was in part dictated by the real-world function of snapshots, and in part it led a life of its own. Either way, it was distinct from style in the contemporaneous art photography (though we can sometimes see mutual influence). Snapshot poses are one aspect of snapshot style. They are very different from poses in art photography, and much could be written about them. When snapshots depict people, which is most of the time, they tend to show someone we can assume was familiar to the snapshooter, but in novel surroundings or doing something special: Mom basting the turkey, the sorority at the lake. The information content of a snapshot usually resides in the fresh context given to that known quantity. So longish shots and full-length poses are the rule. Close-ups are relatively infrequent in snapshots, simply because they had nothing to contribute to the normal snapshot occasion. To a far greater extent than art photography, snapshot photography does not contemplate or examine anything, but rather documents a moment. Another example: early on, when snapshot cameras were still a novelty, posing was formal and self-conscious. Everything stopped when the camera came out—people look so very stiff in old photos that we are tempted to imagine that life itself was somehow stiffer back then. But posing has become increasingly casual—increasingly rare—as cameras have become more ubiquitous. We won’t bother to say “cheese” if everyone is always holding a camera, and the marauding snapshooters roaming among us don’t care if we do. The result is that poses have traded excessive stability for instability. The moment is less critical, and people caught off guard in photos are more common than they once were. I’ve mentioned a couple of cases of “functional” style in posing—style that follows from the way snapshot photography is used. But posing styles can also be arbitrary. For example, in early snapshots groups of women often arrange themselves horizontally—in a “chorus line”—and men vertically—in a pyramid. These poses have gone out of fashion so decisively that, when we see them in old photos, we can’t help realizing that styles of posing can be as antique as those of dress or coiffure. Another example is the “bigfoot” shot, in which the recumbent subject shows the foreshortened bottoms of his or her shoes or feet to the camera; this went out of style before 1940. Beach shots of women draped with kelp seem to end about 1930. Women these days rarely turn away from the camera to display their hair, as was popular until perhaps 1950. Where these posing motifs came from and how they were transmitted is a mystery to me. This example of a “distributed” pose belongs with the first group: it owes its existence to the nature of snapshot photography. The key once again is that, much more than a photograph necessarily has to be, this shot was intended to create a record of an occasion, of some sort of notable moment; the rest was secondary. Everybody was in the frame, and wasn’t that the main thing? In an art photo, the pose is orchestrated (or selected) by an art photographer, and an art photographer would not have permitted the seeming incoherence of this shot. Even a Nan Goldin, who documents personal moments in imitation of snapshots, or a Diane Arbus, who solicited static full-length poses like these, would not have dared. One last point. It’s easy to think that style in snapshots is merely conventional, since conscious formal innovation is generally alien to them. The poses in the first group—the chorus lines, pyramids, and so forth—are indeed just stereotyped camera behavior, though I’d say people in snapshots often strike them with some irony and humor. But the poses in the second group, including the one in the example, represent freedom from convention. The underlying purpose was everything, and the snapshooters found some astonishing ways of achieving it. |
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Machines
This photobooth strip records a half-minute standoff between a photobooth lens, which couldn’t move, and a photobooth subject who didn’t. It’s not easy to judge what (if anything) this unsmiling man was trying to achieve—whether he knew he would be sticking out of the frame at the top, or why he refused to vary the four shots. But by being so stubborn he succeeded in making us conscious of the unwavering impersonality of the booth’s operation; and by effacing his individuality he might almost have been mocking the booth’s own facelessness. His parody, witting or not, gets its edge from the obvious fact that he was a person, with freedoms he wasn’t using and character he didn’t display. A photobooth was a machine: impersonal by definition. The photos it took (unfortunately also called photobooths) were further impersonal in that, in their technical aspects, they were beyond anyone’s control. In contrast to what you could do in them, there was nothing you could do to them, and often enough something needed doing. The machine didn’t follow subjects who moved off-center or out of frame, it didn’t refocus to take account of subjects who leaned toward the lens, and there was no way to adjust the lighting, the shutter speed, or anything else. The interplay between the personal and the impersonal, the movable and the immovable—between what you could do and what was done for you—is part of what makes photobooth portraits interesting. You could control—or at least adjust—a snapshot camera in ways you couldn’t control or adjust a photobooth camera, but the cold mechanics of the process wound up being much the same. You “took” a photobooth by putting in your money and waiting in front of the lens; you could press the button of your snapshot camera when you wanted to, but that was really just an equivalent (if much faster) trigger. You could point a snapshot camera, but since your aim would not be perfect, the subject didn’t necessarily hold still, and you might not have been that interested in a “good shot” anyway, error would creep in—something that wasn’t you would influence the picture. The same went for the other ways of adjusting the mechanism and meddling with its operation, which varied from camera to camera. Snapshots are full of error—not just mistakes, but inaccuracy and defects that were allowed to supervene. Booths did get out of whack and break down, and their repertoire could not have been smaller, but your average photobooth portrait was technically superior to your average snapshot. The part of a photobooth shot or strip that wasn’t created by the user’s own volition was executed by a standard and relatively faultless mechanism that protected the users from themselves: the technical standards of photobooths were higher than those of snapshots not only because there was nothing to adjust, but because there was nothing to do other than pose. The booth contained its own lab and no one ever dealt with film. So that took care of dust, scratches, fingerprints, and probably double exposures and development problems. For the person who used it, the camera effectively existed only as a lens. A photobooth couldn’t be controlled at all; a snapshot was poorly controlled. As control went down, impersonal forces stepped in to do what had to be done. The impersonality of a photobooth portrait—its lack of authorship, particularly artistic authorship—is directly analogous to the impersonality of a snapshot; this similarity, along with the similarity in size and general purpose, is what lets collectors feel photobooths are in the same category as snapshots even though a photobooth camera was not a snapshot camera. In both cases the picture was shaped not by an artist or even by a person, but by a thing—either a mechanism registered with the Patent Office or one we might prefer to call luck or fate. The latter is much the sloppier, and its output is varied. That is the point of interest in snapshots. With photobooths, the mechanism was more reliable, though it was inflexible and couldn’t cope with a subject who didn’t cooperate; against that background the faces varied, and one in a million would be astonishing. Either way, we are looking for something that went wrong, or miraculously right. We are hoping to run across a statistically unlikely but pleasing deviation from an implicit norm. |
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Formal accident: pictorial happenstance
The life of a snapshot was not an easy one. As an image and as an object, a snapshot was assaulted by accidental forces from the beginning, even before the snapshooter pushed the button. We can sort snapshot accidents into three natural “eras”: the era before the shutter snapped (the real events that determined what got into a picture), the era after the shutter snapped but before anyone saw an actual photo (what happened to the image during its processing), and the era after the photo came into being (what befell the physical photograph). Otherwise put, there were accidents to do with the selection of the subject as seen by the camera, accidents of photographic technology, and accidents in the life of the photographic object. All three kinds of accident can help the overall photo-object from the point of view of the aesthetically-minded finder. More than any other kind of photograph, snapshots were accident-prone by nature. Each kind of snapshot accident occurred for its own snapshot reason: in the first era because the shutter snapped casually, in the second era because technical control was poor, and in the third era because snapshots were not protected from harm. The accidents from the three eras are separated into orderly strata in the finished photograph. The “real life” accidents are the deepest, so to speak beneath the emulsion. The strictly photographic flaws are in the emulsion. Age and wear are on the surface. The three kinds of accident—accidents of subject, accidents of technology, and accidents of history—are progressively less likely to create the point of interest in a photo, as opposed to flavoring it or decorating it. Accidents of the first era are the most deeply buried, the most radical, and the most formative. And only the first era has much of a correlate in other kinds of photography. We all know what it means to “catch” something in a photo. I suppose it was clear to photographers from the beginning, and photographic accident in this sense continues to exist in art photography; a photographer can court it. But I don’t need to point out that a pictorial accident courted, caught, and officially claimed by a photographer is different in kind from a pictorial accident stumbled into and tolerated by a snapshooter. This first kind of snapshot accident, governing the way a real event is frozen into a picture, usually amounts to something more than just a formal mutation of an intended image: it composes the image to begin with. In the case where the accident does not simply arrange elements within the frame but actually admits them into it or lets them escape from it—that is, in the case where the accident breaches the frame—I find the results uniquely evocative. A porous frame suggests a world beyond; an image that was clearly to some degree arbitrarily captured inevitably brings to mind everything else, everything that wasn’t captured. And the moment when that arbitrary separation was made is present to the eye as a disruption of the image itself. The intrusive finger in this photo was attached to a hand, the hand was attached to the photographer, and the photographer was sitting in a room behind the camera; the presence of the finger in the frame makes us aware, more aware than we would be without it, of the instant back in the 1930s when photographer, hand, finger, and camera were set in motion to create the image we are looking at. Just as something falling past your window abolishes the view, nice as it may be, and brings in the wider world for an intensified fraction of a second, this picture almost seems to have more on its mind than its ostensible subject, the figure on the street below. |
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Formal accident: technical flaws
For as long as anyone has been taking pictures, some of them haven’t come out. Photographic flaws have to do with weak spots in current technology, which means they evolve along with photography itself. In the case of snapshots, the ever-changing segment of existing photographic technology incorporated by the cameras and processing is always the absolute bottom of the barrel, and the technical problems at every point are glaring—though they may not last long. To take a crude example, double exposures are gone forever, because they were a side effect of the mechanical advancement of film. Black-and-white Polaroids, the kind you pulled from the back of a camera, had characteristic blemishes. Film problems changed with the film; lens problems changed with the lenses. I don’t know just what was too much for the camera in this 1920s example apart from a bit of backlighting, but I can tell you I haven’t seen an effect like this one lately. At any given stage, the snapshooters overlooked photographic flaws to some extent, at least if they weren’t truly lethal to a photo. I’ve often seen severely flawed snapshots pasted without comment into photo albums: they still served their purpose, and that was the main thing. Actually, in many cases the flaws must have been difficult to perceive. The whiz-bang novelty of any technology tends to obscure its problems, so that they become evident only in hindsight—this is clear to us when we buy new electronic devices and wonder how we could have lived with our old ones. An immature color process was still commercial as long as it was new; in the same way, all the deficiencies of consumer photography must have been largely invisible until the next generation of cameras made them impossible to miss. When we look at any blatantly fortunate photographic accident, some sort of awe is part of our experience of it. A shot like this one was created and delivered to us by an absurdly improbable chain of events, and that is some of what our “wow” is about. The picture is a small miracle. But unlike accidents of subject selection, technical flaws don’t make us think about what was outside the frame or about the moment of framing. And unlike wear and damage, they don’t add a historical dimension to a photo considered as an object. They can contribute the atmosphere and texture that make a picture attractive, and in extreme cases (such as double exposures) they can create the entire point of interest. Nevertheless, technical flaws, like any kind of gross accident, will most likely be noxious to the overall image; normally we don’t want them any more than the snapshooters did (if they noticed them). Over- and underexposures are rarely beneficial, for example, and a double exposure is usually just a mess. A technical accident that is truly helpful is an accident of accident, like a blow to the head that changes your personality for the better. We are necessarily interested in freak occurrences of one kind or another, but these accidents of the “middle” era are in a sense freakier than accidents of composition or of history. Purely technical accidents, all about cameras and chemicals and nothing else, do not connect with the world of the snapshooters (as accidents of composition do) or with our world (as do accidents affecting, as objects, the objects that we see and handle), and they can seem merely tricksy—much like technical flash in music or movies or any other medium. For that reason I find them difficult to use. But I stress again that, in this intensely low-grade photographic environment, technical accident must most often be prophylactic, though invisible. If harmful flaws are constantly occurring in large numbers, we will often need another accident to save us from them. |
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Formal accident: wear and damage
I suppose I am not alone in feeling that something is lost when a great painting is restored. Yes, now we can see what the original viewers saw, or at least the restorers’ idea of what that was. And that is valuable. But we have lost a bit of what we normally see in an old object. The feeling of age is part of the feeling of something old, yet we have made the painting as new as it can be. Often we do value old things to some degree just because they are old and really seem old. We may value the language of Shakespeare in part for its very out-of-dateness, for example; someone who loves it wouldn’t want to modernize it, to cleanse it of its crust of time in order to make the underlying plays more directly apprehensible. Does extra visual difficulty, a screen between the painted image and us that the artist had nothing to do with, that crept in later, actually add something? Yes, I think it does. It adds realism. It doesn’t let us pretend that the picture was made yesterday. And it adds pleasure. Age has a feeling, and we may simply like that feeling. Visible age as a sign of actual age: this is rarer in photography and very much something to be valued if we want to really feel the pastness of what is documented in a photo. Even the oldest photograph is not that old in art-historical time, but snapshots tend to live hard lives. It’s really only popular photography and especially snapshots in which the apparent physical age of an object can often telegraph the rough date of the event we are looking at. I am thinking of wear as an organic accretion of micro-insult over a long period of time—as opposed to damage, a coarse, sudden trauma that could have been inflicted a few minutes ago. Wear would speak more to age, damage to neglect (which has its own feeling). But in practice the distinction can be unclear. In the case of this photo I suppose the surface problems help us feel the passage of time (it can’t be that great—perhaps thirty-five years). But the feeling of neglect is stronger. In rare cases wear or damage can do more than add atmosphere; they can seem to intervene sharply in the meaning of an image. Here the overall feeling of neglect creates a couple of subtle visual jokes that make the picture interesting. The disordered surface chimes with (or reinforces) the notable disorder of the scene. And perhaps (we may think at some level) the man has closed his eyes to it all, or allowed it to happen. |
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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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