Idealization

Many kinds of photography try to make people look good. Advertising photography (including fashion and glamour photography), pornography, and commercial portraiture are all in the business of doing just that. Art photography that has one foot in any of those categories does it too: Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, and Annie Leibovitz all use professional techniques to flatter their subjects. Even certain kinds of “vernacular” photography, such as school pictures, want to make subjects happy about the way they look. But school pictures are for sale to the families of their subjects, and idealization in photography in general is about money. Advertising photography, pornography, and commercial portraiture don’t make people look good for fun. They make people look good because the photos or the things depicted in them are consumer commodities, and showing unattractiveness is not the way to sell them. The flagrant ugliness so noticeable in a lot of art photography is at bottom a comment about money in art. It is the flip side of commercial idealization and would not exist without it. Photography that is more detached from commerce, that exists neither to be aimed at consumers nor to comment on being aimed at consumers, can be relied upon neither to beautify nor to uglify. Mugshots, ID photos, medical photography, surveillance photography, and forensic and crime photography (all of which might exist just as they are under a communist system, let’s say) are interested only in getting things exactly right, in showing you just what you would see if you could look carefully at the subject. They are as scientific about personal appearance as photography can be. Snapshots are not about money at all (for the snapshooters or their subjects), and so they don’t have a very powerful interest in making people look good. They would be fully “scientific” except for two things. I’ve mentioned the lack of professional distance between snapshooter and subject. That means the vanity of the subject can contaminate the objectivity of the results, either by consciously or unconsciously guiding the snapshooter or by controlling what survives. And of course snapshots are technically primitive and can’t give much more than a rough impression of what people look like. But by the same token they couldn’t really do much to improve anyone’s appearance even if they wanted to. On balance, physical beauty in snapshots is not concocted. It is real, as is ugliness in snapshots. We have an intuitive feeling about that because we know how and why snapshots were taken. Minus all the accidents that I’ve talked so much about, snapshots are a window. A small, dirty window, but a window. So I think we know instinctively that this camp counselor (as I believe he is) looked very much like this—though whether the photo captures his spirit is another, unanswerable question. The picture functions in my collection (in part) the way a nice shot of a natural wonder might: a view of a tornado, say. I have found this man as much as I have found the picture of him. So a snapshot of someone is in a sense the exact opposite of a commercial headshot, which would not let me “find” a person. A headshot exists only for money and idealizes its subject far beyond believability.

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