Looking for Snapshots

I am sure I never would have gotten interested in snapshots if I hadn’t felt from the beginning, however obscurely, that they were unlike other kinds of photos. I have spent some time here fleshing out that idea. The profound and multiform sloppiness of snapshots, for example, could only exist in a corner of photography where almost no one worried about it too much. That same sloppiness produced some wonderful things. And: only snapshots, because their authorship is radically incomplete, put us in a position to do more with those wonderful things than passively appreciate them. We can use them the way we want to and supply the missing authorship ourselves. (When an appropriationist like Sherrie Levine copies the photographs of Walker Evans or Aleksandr Rodchenko, she is not using anything wonderful in them. She is using their very authorial completeness and no more.) Is there a causal connection between the authorial incompleteness of snapshots and the wonderful things in them? Clearly there is. Clearly the things we think of as wonderful were allowed to enter to the extent that no artist was there to stop them. This correlation was absolute until art photographers noticed snapshots and began to imitate the effect of their own absence. Snapshots are a form—a subcategory of photography with its own formal properties. When we snapshot collectors use snapshots as found photos, what can we do with them that really takes advantage of the form—that does with it what it most profoundly lends itself to? Unless we find a way of doing that, we are not really doing anything. That’s not to say that everything snapshots do must flow directly from their formal properties. If that were true, snapshots would be the same in anyone’s hands. In fact, as I’ve said, the form is so capacious that everyone is alone in it: any mind will inevitably stake out personal territory within that vast space. Snapshot collectors are all doing something personal (though they may not be doing it consciously or well). Any snapshot production—show, book, or website—that fails to acknowledge or embody this truth has missed the point completely. In the verbal component of this blog I have attempted to make that point as impersonally as possible. I have tried to say things any snapshot collector could say—and thereby stay out of the way of the pictures, which are truly mine.

Gallery 1 Gallery 2-A Gallery 2-B Gallery 3-A Gallery 3-B Gallery 3-C