Context

A snapshot was once embedded in levels and levels of context, but in most cases it’s all gone now. There was the deep context of personal or family life, the life that we may see more or less opaquely sampled in the image; as we know, most of the picture’s pre-found meaning came from the back story attached to it, and from the original family’s awareness that it was their back story. More shallowly, the snapshot also had the context of its occasion—a wedding, perhaps, or a trip: the real-life event, the brief slice of that personal or family life, that was important or interesting enough to make someone record an instant of it in the shot. And there was the context of the shoot, the other photos that may or may not have been taken on that occasion. In this example we can see we are missing those local contexts too (and we will be missing more still if we are too young to know what Burma-Shave was). No doubt the snapshooter pulled off the road to take pictures of all six signs within the space of a few minutes. This is the only one I have. But that’s all right. I like it fine, all by itself. The photo has lost all its old context, but it has gained new context by finding the company of its peers in my collection. In fact part of that new context consists precisely of my own taste for the absurdity created by taking things out of context. I can’t judge the strength of my collection, but I think we can say that a strong collection, one guided by a consistent and distinctive taste, gives a found photo a strong context. Simply by being found, a found photo has also entered the broader context of found photos no matter what kind of taste formed the collection it belongs to. Like a found photo, an art photo is taken by one person but (probably, or eventually) owned by another. Is context lost and gained? It’s perfectly true that an art photo may proceed from hidden causes in the photographer’s life, and also that the owner may enjoy it for private reasons. But the general purpose of the photo remains the same when it changes hands, and its more specific meaning is never all that different: the context within which it is understood and valued does not really change. If this had been a deliberately taken art photo, its violent overtones would not have been lost on either the photographer or the owner. We can assume they were lost on the snapshooter, but now that the snapshot is a found photo, they won’t be lost on anyone from here on in. A snapshot becomes analogous to an art photo only after it becomes a found photo. If a collection is not arbitrary, anything in it exemplifies a taste, or one aspect of a taste. In an important sense, a collection selects every snapshot in it, and therefore no collected snapshot exists in isolation. To think of a found photo—a collected snapshot—as no more than a contextless marvel is to deny that a sensibility selected it. Much as an art photo makes the most sense when considered as part of a body of work, a snapshot acquires its full meaning as part of someone’s collection. Another kind of context that a snapshot can have only after it becomes a found photo is the context of display. A photo in a collection can seem far more powerful—and can do far greater justice to the collection—if it is displayed in the right context; perhaps needless to say at this point, effectiveness would not be relevant in a stamp collection any more than it would have been in the original family album, but is very much a part of artistic presentation. In this blog I have tried to use the “Galleries” to exploit this kind of context. In a future Gallery I plan to find a flattering context for a photo I displayed without immediate visual context in one of the other posts. I’m going to do that mostly because I think it’s too good a picture not to milk for all it’s worth, but I'll also be making the point (first made by Sergei Eisenstein with reference to film images) that you can help a picture, even give it the meaning you want to give it, by choosing its neighbors properly. In the next post I want to use the context of display in a slightly different way.

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