Composition and anachronism

The composition of your average snapshot is as tedious as anything else about it. Most of the time the snapshooter just centered the subject and pushed the button. This interior wasn’t straightforwardly centerable. That doesn’t necessarily mean the composition had any special importance to the snapshooter. Yet the picture is all composition, isn’t it? I don’t see much else in it that could have merited a shot. The trouble is that no intentional composition anything like this one had yet been seen in the 1910s or whenever the picture was taken (it couldn’t have been much later). In other words, the shot was almost certainly a mistake or an accident, because its composition is an anachronism. As we know, snapshots are both poorly controlled and unimaginably plentiful. Just as those notorious monkeys with typewriters will eventually produce all existing literature, along with some new writing and a whole lot of garbage, snapshots (within their technical limits) include everything in photo history. Only it doesn’t necessarily come along in the right order. Snapshots must include and do include stylistic anachronisms, produced, accidentally, at low concentrations and randomly scattered through the corpus. Among other sorts of anachronisms, you’ll come across historically incongruous compositions—in fact ones that remind you of any period in the history of the medium and any photographer you can think of. If only you knew what to look for, you would even be able to find compositions characteristic of periods that lie in our own future. I don’t mind anachronism. In fact I like it. It goes with the enterprise, which has to do with taking things out of context. This luminous picture seems all the more beautiful to me for being so clear on that point: for so plainly forcing us to misinterpret it in order to appreciate it at all. The example is not really different from the usual snapshot case. But it is more unmistakable. I am glad to admit that there is a sort of heedlessness, even an insolence or arrogance, in what snapshot collectors do. In order to “find,” we willfully misunderstand, and that may annoy some people. For Duchamp a hardware store was a place to get objects of a certain kind, which he displayed as if they were his. Was he interested in hardware? As source material, yes. For us a flea market or garage sale is a place to get objects of another kind, which we display as if they were ours. Snapshots are source material for us. We would be truly silly to ignore this vast pool of imagery, which contains everything—including photographic ideas that no one has ever had. It would be interesting to know for sure what the snapshooter was or was not trying to do with this shot. But in the end it doesn’t matter. I like the result. I take this picture on its own terms. That is a delicate way of describing what we do, which is, I believe, not a delicate thing at all.

Roll over to enlarge