Funk

Snapshots have to be cheap and easy to take—that’s the point of them for the consumer. That means the technical aspect of the medium is only as good as it needs to be, and often it’s much worse. Every stage of the photographic process that produces snapshots represents a corruption of the state of the art. So the pictures themselves are always corrupt. Snapshots are so funky that plenty of photographically-attuned people don’t accept them as photography or even really notice them. Funk is my word for a general cruddiness that we might think of as technical accident on a small scale. Like technical accident, funk comes from bad cameras and bad processing. It is caused by low-grade lenses and poorly designed mechanisms, by dusty negatives and incompletely rinsed chemicals. Funk is perhaps the most obvious way that snapshots fail to provide a faithful transcription of intention. By contrast, professional photography wants all the control it can get and has no room for funk. Funk is also the enemy of the amateur photographer, who wants to be a professional. It seems this amateur photographer really tried, but the camera and the lab still wrecked the picture. Without the information on the back, we would never have even known what we were looking at. We would have enjoyed it anyway, of course (and, knowing more of the story, we enjoy it now in a different way). Funk is the snapshot collector’s friend for the very same reason that it’s the amateur photographer’s enemy: it effaces intention. That lets us impose our own. Funk is one of the factors that take control away from the snapshooter and give it to us. To the extent that a photo’s effect is unintended—to the extent that the picture we see just occurred—its authorship is up for grabs. We need funk for what it does, but it would be best to also like it for itself. A snapshot collector who doesn’t actually like crudball photography has a pretty strange relationship with the medium. If I may speak personally, snapshot funk tickles me because I’m not very funky. I am a natural precisionist. I don’t take photographs, but if I did, I would instinctively want to take photos that were as technically perfect as it was possible to be. Snapshots give me what I don’t have; they let me do what I can’t do by myself. They help me fight a tendency in myself that I’m not proud of. Funk is a look, and here is where it distinguishes itself from other kinds of technical uncontrollability in snapshots (which may contribute occasional gross accident). Many art photographers have been drawn to snapshots, but few have been interested in this aspect of them. It could plausibly be put to work as a formal element, as a kind of controlled lack of control. But someone like Lee Friedlander is just as finicky about focus and clean negatives as any other photographer, and the same is true of his “snapshot aesthetic” peers, with the possible partial exceptions of Robert Frank and William Klein. Funk has not been well assimilated. This is one respect in which snapshots still have something to say.

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