Collecting and selecting

Some people just like to have stuff. They have different ways of coming by it, which may or may not be pleasurable in and of themselves. The composite enterprise of searching for a well-defined category of stuff in order to have it, and then having it, is what I mean by collecting. I don’t know about stamps or swizzle sticks, but it seems to me that collecting snapshots can’t help but be an expressive behavior. It might be only weakly expressive, of course, but selecting, non-randomly, a photo from a pool of billions must be like non-randomly selecting a shot from a pool of (potential) billions—what a photographer does. The snapshot pool is vast and almost entirely uninteresting. Nobody’s selection is small and almost entirely uninteresting—there would be no point to that. Not even a historian of photography’s selection, which may be doing its best to be objective, is the snapshot pool in microcosm. Everyone interprets the pool. Everyone’s collection is, in one way or another, personal. Even if collectors don’t always think of themselves as engaged in artistic activity of any description, what they do still obeys at least some of the rules of artistic activity. Here’s an example of what I mean. Most people like babies, but snapshot collectors are people and, at least when it comes to snapshots, they don’t like babies. This is a pretty noticeable lacuna, since if snapshots in the wild—that is, unwinnowed snapshots from the pool, not yet “found” by anyone—have a number-one subject, it’s babies. And there’s no doubt at all what the problem is: every one of us is afraid of sentimentality, as artists are. It’s kind of funny when you think about it, because the snapshooters themselves weren’t sentimentalists. When parents took snapshots of their babies they did it in an utterly documentary spirit, just the way tourists took snapshots of Old Faithful and GIs took snapshots of killed enemy soldiers; baby pictures are no different in this respect from travel or trophy pictures or any other snapshot genre. But that doesn’t matter. We aren’t interested in what the snapshooters were doing. Or if we are, what we are doing is more important in the end. There are ways of letting babies back in. But these exceptions to the general distaste for babies prove the rule. For example, a baby picture that is dark enough, nasty enough, will overwhelm the sentimentality problem, in effect commenting on it. This photo, the way I mean it, pointedly avoids the problem by a hair’s breadth, even pretends to publicly censor it.

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