Antiques

In much contemporary collecting, a snapshot has to be old. For example, in his afterword to The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978, the collector, Robert Jackson, says, “I am too close to the 1980s and beyond to be able to ‘see’ a good snapshot [from that era] objectively.” This is probably a pretty widespread feeling. I am not immune to the pull of the old, but I resist it somewhat. Age can contribute a lot, as we know. A certain patina can add historical density, and it can also function as a formal element in its own right. But a taste for the old can all too easily be a taste for nostalgia, and nostalgia probably won’t do. It’s usually a form of sentimentality and hard to put to good use in art (I continue to assume we’re interested in snapshots as art of some kind). Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong with a lovely nostalgia like Joseph Cornell’s, evoked precisely through the use of old images and old objects. And if someone thinks there’s no way for a contemporary artist to find anything but nostalgia, anything but some flight from the present, in old materials used specifically for their age, I would point to the grand and ferocious work of Bill Morrison. But in any case I don’t see myself as in the business of amassing old objects. I am not a collector of antiques. I want a found image, an image that I can invest with meaning because it has lost its own—preferably an image “fortified” with tangibility and a third dimension and a past, if you like—and the snapshot pool is the place to go for one. By the snapshot pool I mean all the snapshots ever taken. The available snapshot pool, the group of pictures that surface in estate sales, auctions, flea markets, “paper” shows, and so forth, is heavy on the older pictures—partly because the newer ones are still functioning as family photos for extant families, and partly because so far there’s little demand for them. But I make an effort to include recent photos in my collection. I want my collection to say, among the other things I hope it says, that I am not interested in age for its own sake. If Duchamp had used only old objects as readymades, would we have felt something was wrong? I think we would have. And we might have been so confused that we missed the point altogether. For me the image, “found” in my parasitic, hermit-crab sort of way, is primary: I want that to be as clear as possible. That message, and anything else I might be trying to do with my collection, would be muddled if I seemed to be unduly bewitched by age itself. The 1980 dividing line observed (consciously or not) by many snapshot collectors and ignored by me coincides with the important change in snapshot format that I mentioned earlier. A “recent” photo is generally a borderless print, usually glossy and 4” x 6”, the kind we all know. What are snapshot collectors who exclude recent photos really bothered by, and what am I trying not to be bothered by? Could it be the relative insubstantiality of borderless prints as objects? We will know the answer in a decade or two. But I find it highly significant that fairly recent photobooths and Polaroids seem to strike people as collectible.

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