Foundness; the eye of the finder

A found object isn’t just an object that someone has found. A found object is an object looked at with new aesthetic eyes, effectively commandeered for a new art purpose. The finder of a found object is always frankly taking advantage of it—pretending to forget about one aspect of it in order to exploit another aspect of it. That’s part of foundness; otherwise a ceremonial mask, let’s say, in the new context of an art museum would be a found object. And what kind of advantage we are taking of the object determines the feeling of the result. We aren’t necessarily being nice about it. I am being careful not to say that a pre-found object intends one thing and a post-found object intends another. It’s true enough for Bottle Rack, but a found object, considered most broadly, can be taken from nature, and nature doesn’t intend. So it’s better to say just that the finder is claiming a new intention. With a snapshot, we usually can’t know for sure what the original intention was, though most often we have a very, very good idea. But in “finding” a snapshot we are asserting that our purpose is new—we are declaring (whether we know it or not) that, as far as we are concerned, our attitude toward it is not the attitude of the snapshooter. That’s why an amateur photo (a would-be professional photo) or a professional photo just doesn’t do it for us in the same way. A found photo is a two-way misunderstanding. We aren’t getting the original point, of course. We are always missing the “sentimental value” of a photo. Sentimental value doesn’t have to do with sentimentality—that’s an art term—but rather with real-life personal meaning. This was probably the only kind of value a snapshot had for the snapshooter. We know it was there, would still be there if the snapshooter or anyone sufficiently closely related were here to recognize it, but for us it’s inaccessible. The absence of sentimental value for us is what frees us to see something that would have been invisible or irrelevant to the snapshooter or anyone in the snapshooter’s environment. The snapshooter missed the photo as a photo, just as the designer of Bottle Rack missed Bottle Rack as sculpture. And just as Bottle Rack, even now that it’s a found object, can still be appreciated for its design—though, crucially, not used for its original purpose—a snapshot can possess all sorts of intentional qualities that we get something out of (humor, for example). But we are still repositioning it radically, in a way that probably would have baffled the snapshooter. Part of the pleasure of a rock that we like for its sculptural qualities is that we know it’s just a rock—a sculpture wouldn’t be fun in the same way. And like a rock or any other found object, a found photo does more than just exist in the new art context we are claiming for it; in a sense it actually plays on the fact that there is one. In fact, from its position of ignorance, it comments on the old context. Our sympathy, or irony, or mockery, or objective appreciation—whatever specific attitude we have toward the material offered by the object—is part of the object. It feels like part of the object, because the selection is inevitably full of the selecter the same way art is full of the artist. Within the category that we all accept, individual taste governs what we do. It could hardly be otherwise—snapshots are too many and too various, and no one is telling us how to take them. What we bring to our choices is all about us; the beauty of snapshots is that they allow us the freedom to put so much of ourselves into them. I mentioned the stance we necessarily take toward what we see in one of our own found photos. General facts about our constitution go into the finding, too. Our photographic education, our awareness of other snapshot collectors, our visual imagination, our sense of humor, and more are also part of our selection. In sum: finding a photo is the result of imaginatively inhabiting uninhabited photographic material. Found photography is an art of selection, exactly like most kinds of regular art photography; and, like art photography, it is always the work of an individual eye. The first example is a photographically “pure” accidental shot, with an equally accidental and equally photographically pure prefiguration of Robert Frank. From the point of view of the finder, of course—the kind of finder who likes references to art photography—it is an echo of Robert Frank. The second example might appeal to a crueler sort of eye, one happy to take advantage of something in the situation that clearly escaped the participants. In the last example, the point of interest is the result of what seems to be deliberate defacement (possibly out of despair over a botched tint job). The effect is not strictly photographic. Not every finder will accept it.

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