Beyond the collection

A found photo is a special kind of found object. But how about what Duchamp actually did with found objects? Was that anything like what a snapshot collector does? Let’s assume, as I generally do, that the snapshot collector is an aesthetically-minded one. Unless I misjudge Duchamp, his relationship with his audience was not unlike that of a scientist, a performer, or a bomb-thrower, all of which he resembled: his art didn’t do the job for him personally until his discovery, his act, his provocation, met his public. But for someone like me the hunt and the having are ends in themselves. I enjoy both. In particular, finding a snapshot that hits the sweet spot, but is still a surprise, seems to enlarge me, just a little, in a very personal sense. But is it enough to keep doing that? Do the amassed photos necessarily amount to something? If finding a photo is like taking a photo, is a collection of found photos a body of work? Is it one thing in any significant sense? Certainly it is not usually a thing fashioned with presentation in mind, a thing intended for maximum effectiveness. I’ve noticed that I am very hesitant to show my collection to other collectors. I am not proud of my collection as an object, though I am proud of many of the photos in it. Actually, I can’t really see it as a coherent object at all. I’ve had to admit to myself that, no matter how concentrated and distinct my aesthetic may become and no matter how faithful the individual photos are to it, I will never believe that thousands of photos can just be something that matters. Or perhaps what I believe is that a collection of photos is not yet what it can be, if presented properly. Many collectors seem to feel something similar: they group and arrange their pictures, make little books out of them, and so forth, as if the urge to search out, to recognize, and to amass—to exercise the aesthetic sense in acquisition—at some point gave way to the superordinate urge to build, to shape. Is it really impossible for a collection of photos to be greater than the sum of its parts—for something to simply emerge from an undifferentiated mass, like intelligence from a clump of neurons? Nick Osborn’s Square America might seem to suggest that it isn’t out of the question. Square America (not fully restored as of this writing, though a version is in progress here) represented only a large subset of an even larger collection, but in principle it was capable of transforming a very large collection into a meta-object that made aesthetic sense, by taking advantage of the resources and the capacity of a website. Crucially, though, the site had a lot of internal structure—it was much more than just a vast array of photos. So here too, collecting snapshots supplies the raw material for an object that has more to it than just the collection itself. Once again the analogy I am looking for is with the practice of a photographer. Even though every shot may be in some way an expression of that practice, that doesn’t mean the mere totality of them will hang together as a single aesthetic object. Why should it? In order to make them more than the unorganized issue of a long-term activity, something extra is going to be required, some sort of winnowing, grouping, and arranging. In the case of a photographer like Robert Frank, an edifice like The Americans will be very much greater than the sum of its parts, magnificent as they may be. And since those parts themselves are just the tip of the iceberg of an activity extending over a period of years—an activity that produced thousands upon thousands of pictures that never got used and would have to be judged experimental, like brushstrokes that a painter covers over or scrapes down—the finished book is a completely different order of thing from the daily gleanings that went into it. For someone like me the two sides of the project are psychologically disjoint. In amassing the pictures I am beholden to no one. The activity is messy and pure fun. But in shaping the mass of them I consider the public, and myself. The activity is disciplined and less unambiguously fun, though it is far more urgent. I can still trick myself into thinking my own part in the business is a selfless one—by imagining that I am just showing the pictures to their best advantage or acting as their advocate—but it is more difficult.