Categories

I’d guess that most snapshot collectors have at some point had a reason to dream up categories for their pictures. Once you’ve taken the first few snapshots home, you start asking yourself what you’re doing, and a first answer will probably have to do with categories. And when you have thousands of pictures, you may continue with categories as an organizing principle, just so you can find things when you want them. But when you do what you may ultimately want to do with your photos—that is, present them in some way—do categories still make sense? No, they don’t. Here categories are lethal. I will explain. It’s no longer a surprise to see snapshots in American art museums. Museum snapshots—what some people call “vernacular photography”—always come sorted into categories. In part this is because the genre “vernacular photography” (very much unlike the aestheticized snapshots of most collectors) is conceived as a body of historical or cultural objects to be studied, analogous to the objects studied by archaeology or botany: if you’re going to do snapshotology, you’ve got to classify your snapshots. The categories of vernacular photography resemble a taxonomy, so to speak, a reasoned breakdown of the snapshot corpus. And a few museum categories actually do have some historical or cultural substance. When you pick hula gals out of the snapshot pool, you’ve identified a real phenomenon: there really was a hula craze and it really is represented in snapshot photography. But most of the categories are arbitrary, and they certainly aren’t exhaustive. As an analysis, they fail. Another reason museums use categories is just that they’ve inherited them wholesale from the donor: that’s how the gifts come. But the decisive reason they use categories, I’m afraid, is that there’s nothing else to do with the pictures—they’re too weak to be displayed individually. With a category, you can put a lot of photos together in one frame and no one has to look very hard at any of them. These assortments still aren’t anything the viewer can actually enjoy (they don’t work as Becher-like arrays, for example), but that’s O.K.: the viewer, enjoyment, all that is beside the point. The point is getting the pictures under glass, like specimens. The categories are a way to do it and they don’t really do any harm. There’s nothing to harm. Snapshot categorization is increasingly influential outside museums. Even collectors whose practice really is aesthetically coherent now often present their photos in categories. The trouble with this is that it’s distracting and trivializing: there is something to harm. The snapshot underground—and the place where most of us live can only be called that—is all about aesthetics; we’re an underground precisely because above-ground snapshots are now so clearly about something else. When we feel our collections are more selective than museum snapshots, we mean that our aesthetic demands are greater. We even think—in one way or another, at one level or another—that finding a photo is like taking a photo (to use that formula one more time). But what photographer would sort finished work into categories for any reason? I ask you: Would Eggleston group his photos of cars together? Would Frank have thought of his pictures of jukeboxes as a meaningful class? It’s obvious that the aesthetic value of these bodies of work cuts across all such categories, which means that a prominent categorization could only cause confusion. Presentation in categories would suggest to the viewer that the categories themselves were supposed to mean something, and at the same time it would obscure the true value of the work; it would actually get in the way of showing the photos to their advantage. In the same way, I could present this snapshot by putting it in a “hats” category or something, but that would be basically an insult. I’d be mistreating the picture—ignoring its strength and pointing the viewer to something superficial. And I’d be mistreating myself by refusing to get the most out of my own picture. Some snapshot categorizers, aware of the problem at some level, may hesitate to waste a really great picture by losing it in a category: a categorization asserts, in this case falsely, that category members are equivalent, that their only important attribute is membership. In other words a categorized photo can’t be so good that it stands out. Doesn’t this show that something is wrong? But suppose you do want to get the most out of a good picture when you present it. How do you do that? You use context and you use formal tricks. In a book, for example, you’d exploit the two-page spreads and you’d choose facing photos so as to favor both of them. A pairing can be illuminating, but you don’t learn anything from snapshot categories. They simply don’t get at anything important about snapshots. It’s my assumption that we want to get at something nontrivial in snapshots, and I suppose I am leaving out of consideration collectors who do not. The “snapshot aesthetic” photographers—Frank, Maier, Arbus, Friedlander and the rest—deserve that label because each of them found something nontrivial to emulate in snapshots. Did they notice hula gals? They did not. That would have been silly. Nor did they care about anything else corresponding to “vernacular” subject categories. When modern collectors like us admire (for example) the objectiness of snapshots, we’re noticing something else the snapshot aesthetic photographers never thought of, but it’s not silly at all. And there’s a lot more, much of it truly potent. None of this is going to be capable of being dramatized through categories. When snapshots first began attracting notice outside the collecting community—that was back in the 20th century—curators, gallerists and publishers saw in them the very same aesthetic qualities that the collectors did, following the lead of the “snapshot aesthetic” photographers. But the field didn’t manage to define itself very well, and the part of it that faced the public soon began to change. Today its official precincts have been engulfed by an anti-aesthetic element, and what the public sees has become something entirely inconsequential; nobody in museums and galleries is trying very hard and the thinking there has apparently stopped evolving. The odd thing is that we, the aesthetically-minded collectors who may once have known we could do better than what this “vernacular photography” has turned out to be, have adopted its one and only tool—categories—very much as if we’ve forgotten how to take our own collections seriously. What are we actually driving at? What are our collections about? Each collector will have an individual answer; each of us must locate what we’re really doing and treat it right. A necessary first step is to stop reducing it to the lowest common denominator of simple-minded categories. Categories must go.

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