Extremes of condition

Not everyone can look at snapshots seriously. And those who can aren’t necessarily doing the same thing. If you accept snapshots, you can see them as photography. Or you can see them as art, in a Duchampian sense (though you may not put it that way to yourself; for example, I think people from the antiques world who have a feeling for snapshots are always Duchampians even if they’d rather not use the word “art” at all in a context like this). I don’t mean to suggest that you can’t see snapshots as both photography and art, but people usually come to them from one side or the other—these are different perspectives, with different standards and frames of reference. I believe they amount to a split within the field, one of the most fundamental conflicts we have. Most of the time the difference between the photography camp and the art camp is latent: it has no visible reflex. But we can tease it out by considering the case of extreme condition problems. Do you think they can help? Or do they always hurt? “Ruined” photos can be striking. Nevertheless, snapshot people with specifically photographic orientations—such as those who arrived at snapshots from art photography, through some process of generalization—may not be able to see them as anything but compromised. If a snapshot is a work made by someone in anything like the way an art photo is, damage to it will be in the same category as dust on it: not part of the picture. A photo taken by an art photographer is supposed to remain pristine from the moment it was made. Why should a snapshot be any different? More and more, snapshots are photography in good enough standing that they can be hung on museum walls, but I doubt we will see the day when a picture like this Bacony mess, which is remarkable precisely because of the damage it has sustained, is accepted curatorially in the same spirit or at all. I understand the thinking, but to assimilate snapshots to straight photography is to miss their all-important accidental component. A “foundist” collector like me sees no reasoned way to rule out accidental damage, no matter how severe. It’s not just that a snapshot is exposed to accidents an art photo is probably protected from; much more fundamentally, a snapshot is accidental all the way down. It is not the work of the snapshooter. Its entire history is a series of chance occurrences that started even before the shutter snapped and extends to the present. Where does a finished photo stop and unwanted happenstance begin? There really is no such fixed place. The best that can be said is that a snapshot was finished if something happens to make it look worse.

Roll over to enlarge