Formal accident: pictorial happenstance

The life of a snapshot was not an easy one. As an image and as an object, a snapshot was assaulted by accidental forces from the beginning, even before the snapshooter pushed the button. We can sort snapshot accidents into three natural “eras”: the era before the shutter snapped (the real events that determined what got into a picture), the era after the shutter snapped but before anyone saw an actual photo (what happened to the image during its processing), and the era after the photo came into being (what befell the physical photograph). Otherwise put, there were accidents to do with the selection of the subject as seen by the camera, accidents of photographic technology, and accidents in the life of the photographic object. All three kinds of accident can help the overall photo-object from the point of view of the aesthetically-minded finder. More than any other kind of photograph, snapshots were accident-prone by nature. Each kind of snapshot accident occurred for its own snapshot reason: in the first era because the shutter snapped casually, in the second era because technical control was poor, and in the third era because snapshots were not protected from harm. The accidents from the three eras are separated into orderly strata in the finished photograph. The “real life” accidents are the deepest, so to speak beneath the emulsion. The strictly photographic flaws are in the emulsion. Age and wear are on the surface. The three kinds of accident—accidents of subject, accidents of technology, and accidents of history—are progressively less likely to create the point of interest in a photo, as opposed to flavoring it or decorating it. Accidents of the first era are the most deeply buried, the most radical, and the most formative. And only the first era has much of a correlate in other kinds of photography. We all know what it means to “catch” something in a photo. I suppose it was clear to photographers from the beginning, and photographic accident in this sense continues to exist in art photography; a photographer can court it. But I don’t need to point out that a pictorial accident courted, caught, and officially claimed by a photographer is different in kind from a pictorial accident stumbled into and tolerated by a snapshooter. This first kind of snapshot accident, governing the way a real event is frozen into a picture, usually amounts to something more than just a formal mutation of an intended image: it composes the image to begin with. In the case where the accident does not simply arrange elements within the frame but actually admits them into it or lets them escape from it—that is, in the case where the accident breaches the frame—I find the results uniquely evocative. A porous frame suggests a world beyond; an image that was clearly to some degree arbitrarily captured inevitably brings to mind everything else, everything that wasn’t captured. And the moment when that arbitrary separation was made is present to the eye as a disruption of the image itself. The intrusive finger in this photo was attached to a hand, the hand was attached to the photographer, and the photographer was sitting in a room behind the camera; the presence of the finger in the frame makes us aware, more aware than we would be without it, of the instant back in the 1930s when photographer, hand, finger, and camera were set in motion to create the image we are looking at. Just as something falling past your window abolishes the view, nice as it may be, and brings in the wider world for an intensified fraction of a second, this picture almost seems to have more on its mind than its ostensible subject, the figure on the street below.

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