Folk art

In the previous section I used the word “art” as a cover term for any sort of image-making. That’s not the most familiar use of the word (and it’s not how I’ve generally been using it here). Usually we think of art as what artists do: it is created by conscious human effort to fit into some kind of aesthetic context. By that standard you can’t have inadvertent art until someone puts it to use in the right kind of way, at which point it isn’t inadvertent anymore. That bottle rack wasn’t art until Duchamp made Bottle Rack out of it, and snapshots aren’t art until we make found photos out of them. For a long time snapshots placed in an art context were uncontroversially known as found photos (the term goes back to the 1960s) and, implicitly or explicitly, considered the work of a Duchampian finder: “our” art, if anyone’s. But lately, more or less contemporaneously with the advent of the pretentious term “vernacular photography,” snapshots have begun to be reinterpreted as folk art. I don’t know where it came from, but the idea that the snapshooters were humble artists, whose work we simply curate, is familiar these days. I don’t find it a sensible one. This folk photography, or whatever we might want to call it, would be a grass-roots art form analogous to other kinds of folk art—one that used the medium of snapshot photography as exactly what it was, not in a strained imitation of something better. Thus it would be very different from “amateur photography,” which wants to be better than it is. In snapshots at the top of their technical range (or other snapshot-like small photos) we can occasionally identify amateur photography by a telltale artiness. “Folk photography” wouldn’t be arty. But it would be someone’s deliberate work, not some crazy accident. No one is interested in amateur photography in snapshots or elsewhere (though its day may yet come). But it does show us something. Amateur photography emulates a fancier photography in technique along with everything else; so you can’t really see amateur photography in ordinary drugstore snapshots. The impulse to take a “nice” photo by standards learned from a higher-class photography would have been frustrated by regular snapshot photography, because the poor control and low technical standards inherent in the medium tended to muddy or destroy intention. If you tried to use snapshots for that purpose, you would fail, generally speaking. But the attempts must have been made, and they must often have produced some pretty peculiar results, destined to mystify people like us decades later. Those results probably include a fairly large category of what seem to be experimental snapshots—the seemingly funky set-up shots, apparently arbitrary views of natural objects, mysterious close-ups, shadowy rooms, and so forth that all snapshot collectors know. If their technical standards were a bit better, those pictures would look like amateur photography. So it seems to me that identifiable amateur photography is exclusively a borderland phenomenon in snapshots—for the same reason that most photos of any kind would be wrecked if they had to be realized as crummy old snapshots. Snapshot photography is a great leveler. Now where is this folk photography? I don’t think it’s a phantasm, exactly. I agree that people must have tried to use snapshot photography as an organic artistic medium, just as they must have tried to use it as amateur photography. But, as with amateur photography, it’s not easy to point to examples. Snapshot collectors don’t collect them. We might, or someone not totally fixated on found photography might, if only clear cases existed. Once again, the medium smudges intention so thoroughly that you almost never know what to make of a snapshot. Even under the best of circumstances, a photo doesn’t tell us very much about why it was made. Snapshots, with their lo-fi standards and one-size-fits-all formats, are even less forthcoming on that point. There are really only a few cases in which we might be able to spot a snapshot artist. We might hear what we need to know from the artist himself or herself, in verbal material on the back of a photo (I’ve never run across any examples, but they must exist). We might be able to triangulate on the artist’s intention by seeing some context: several samples or attempts. Or we might see the evidence of the hand of the artist where the photo-object has been worked in some way. Here are a few examples of the last case. I chose them to show that the problem remains awful. I am prepared to call the first example the art of the photographer and tinter, not a “found photo”—even though we know tinting was not usually an art form, but just a way of adding color to a photography that still lacked it. The picture is just too beautiful. At the other pole, the appeal of the second example is clearly inadvertent. I am “taking advantage” of the surface working more or less the way I am in the case of an ordinary snapshot. The last example is beautiful enough, but it is not the art of the photographer and scissors-wielder. I know that because I found the photo myself in a stack of about a hundred, all in the same format, taken by the same camera, and altered by the same pinking shears, and all but this one perfectly ordinary. It is a found photo, a random occurrence that I felt was something special. But if I had found it alone, I might have been inclined to put it with the first example. Am I so sure about that one?

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