A one-way street? Part I

Snapshots haven’t been around that long as a significant art-world phenomenon. We’re getting on toward the twenty-five-year mark, I calculate, and that might be a bit generous depending on what you consider significant. At the beginning, snapshots exhibited in museums and published in museum catalogues were called “found photos.” These days they’re referred to as “vernacular photography.” As I mentioned, the change in terminology corresponds to a rethinking of the material by the institutions that present it. Snapshots seen by the public were at first the aesthetic reclamations of collectors. They were called found photos because they were a species of found objects, where that term is understood in its technical art sense. But now they simply document snapshot photography itself or the social context in which it existed. It’s important to note that the new interpretation doesn’t tolerate even a hint of the old one. To the extent that museums are interested in snapshotological specimens categorized and arrayed under glass like antiquities, the collector’s eye is a distraction. That’s why snapshots considered as vernacular photography “can’t be too good,” in one curator’s words. Putting it differently, the art of snapshots doesn’t mix with the science of snapshots. Collectors have become more sophisticated, but otherwise we haven’t changed. The aesthetes among us are still aesthetes. Our snapshots are still found photos. So we’re out of touch with what museum snapshots have become. Or maybe it’s better to say we don’t know how to care about what museum snapshots have become. It really is a terribly limited and boring thing, whereas true found photos can be used in ways as varied as the collectors themselves. I note parenthetically that I am speaking solely of the snapshot scene in the United States. Collectors abroad who think of themselves as cousins of their American counterparts may be amazed by what has happened to public snapshots in this country. Now, art, like fashion, moves in cycles, and it’s possible we are seeing the beginning of some sort of oscillation in the interpretation of snapshots. Found objects haven’t really gone out of style, have they? So the larger post-Duchamp regime still stands and snapshots could conceivably become found photos again. The curators all get their inventory from the same place and mostly don’t talk to real snapshot people, so maybe they’re the ones who are out of touch. Really, what kind of way is that to run an art movement? Can it last? Chris Steiner’s recent collector-based shows at Connecticut College, hosting first Robert Jackson and then Nick Osborn, may indicate that something is changing or at least wants to change. But art also moves in straight lines, and we might be on a one-way street: snapshots might have become vernacular photography for good. What’s now being called vernacular photography is more widespread and seemingly more entrenched than found photos ever were, after all; the popularity of the idea coincides with the broad acceptance of snapshots by American museums. Even if a single source has been supplying museums nationwide, they have their own reasons for taking a unified line with the stuff, and the result is an art “movement” propelled by people who aren’t artists. Are there other considerations? What else can the history of art and museology tell us about what is going on here? More in the next post. To the right is the germ of a possible “vernacular photography” category that, like “hula gals” but unlike most other museum categories, is anchored in a real-life phenomenon: people really did take snapshots of car accidents to back up insurance claims. One of the examples is better than the others, but perhaps it isn’t as overwhelmingly exceptional as the hula gal in the last post and would get by in a group of fifteen or twenty without attracting too much notice. Certainly where it falls in the sequence does not matter; since a “vernacular photography” category is an unordered set of photos whose actual appearance is irrelevant, I am merely “mentioning” the windshield shot, so to speak, not using it. But in the next post I will use it.

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