Control

Even now a snapshot camera is not a precision instrument. There’s a lot you can fiddle with if you’re brave, but not much you can actually control. At the beginning of the classical snapshot period you usually couldn’t even frame the shot (as opposed to centering the subject). Once you got through not being able to control your shot, you consigned the film to an anonymous and standardless lab and couldn’t control its development and printing. The only thing you could really control in the whole process was the subject. And that was fine. Snapshot photography was all about the subject. The snapshooters didn’t chafe at the uncontrollability of snapshot cameras; they’d willingly given up control—not that most people ever really wanted it anyway—in exchange for simplicity, for the ability to get a rough record of the subject without having to think about it too much. That was the original bargain offered by Kodak and eagerly accepted by millions upon millions of people who, you would have to say, weren’t interested in photography in and of itself. Were there exceptions? Were there people who at least tried to “do something” with snapshot photography? There must have been, and in fact we’ll come to some marginal cases. But by and large snapshot photography was too primitive for that. Even supposing you did your best to turn it to some (more or less) artistic purpose, your efforts would be largely thwarted, and hidden from us today, by the low fidelity and the massive variability built into the system. So clear examples of snapshot artists are essentially absent from the corpus. A world in which snapshot results faithfully expressed snapshot intentions would be a different world. In that world, snapshot photography would have room for a naïve or folk photography corresponding to other kinds of naïve or folk art. But that world is not our world. In our world, impersonal forces to a great extent wrested control of snapshot photography away from the snapshooter, and they are responsible for creating what we like. Even when a snapshot seems just nice to us, it was in fact the lucky beneficiary of a series of favorable accidents. Probably no one gave it much help in avoiding the unfavorable accidents that hurt so many other snapshots. They just didn’t happen this time.

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