Feeling

An earlier version of this post appeared on Stacy Waldman's blog House of Mirth Photos and Ephemera. We all know what we mean when we say a work of art “has a feeling.” The artist may have intended merely to solve a formal problem, yet in the course of solving it has managed to put something across. We may even have the sensation that the artist is speaking to us. A snapshot can also seem to be full of feeling. The puzzle for us would be how feeling got into it if, as I say, no one took it. The whole thing is an accident, isn’t it? Accident can account for a formal property like composition. But feeling? The key is that when any photo “has” feeling (or a feeling) for us—I mean something people agree about—it comes in part from the way the subject is handled. That is, it comes from formal properties again. An artist, whose task is to achieve acceptable formal resolution, deals with those properties consciously and directly. But a snapshooter probably wants first and foremost to get a record of the subject; the formal properties of the picture come along for the ride. Possibly they are related to some nonexpressive purpose we can only guess at. For instance, consider the subject’s interesting remoteness from the camera in these examples—its “lostness” within the frame. This might have come about in the first case because the snapshooter had to get the shot from a distance or not at all. In the second example, perhaps the snapshooter was having fun catching the subject unawares. The shot of the Macy’s balloon surely meant just “here it comes” and was probably only the first of a series. But we aren’t really thinking about any of that. We just pick up that lostness, can’t help picking it up. So the feeling is put in our minds by visual details that, almost certainly, nobody ever imagined could carry it—formal attributes that, before these pictures got yanked out of their original context, didn’t carry it. Now we know. Just as nobody took the picture, nobody created the feeling. Probably nobody even noticed the feeling until we did. It is strange to think of millions upon millions of snapshots entombed in forgotten photo albums, cartons in the back of the closet, and landfills, all alive with fortuitous feeling. Well, I search for it, and I rescue a little of it. I like the fact that there is such a thing as feeling nobody creates, and I like this particular feeling that nobody created. Part of what snapshot collectors notice, choose, and assemble has to do with emotional tone. Here I’ve drawn attention to one such tone, a simple and clear one for the purposes of this demonstration but still one that might not have been all that striking in any one picture, by bringing together a few examples of it. Artists who use found objects are usually interested in something about the look of them (as opposed to the mere fact of them). Despite everything Duchamp said about retinality, Bottle Rack is a good example—its elegance is part of the joke. But snapshots, which as we know are found objects of a kind, have not just a found look, but a found emotional tone. Does any other kind of found object give you that to play with?

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