Imitation

We know that snapshots are mostly boring, but a found photo—a snapshot or other non-art photo given meaning by someone who didn’t take it—can be boring, too: finding a photo can be as thoughtless an activity as taking one. Both logic and experience suggest that the percentages are no better for found photos than for any other kind. One way a found photo can be boring is to be derivative. For example, it’s easy to use snapshots to imitate existing art photographers. There are snapshot collectors who got started doing just that; snapshots are a cheap (though labor-intensive) source of something approaching equivalents of name photography. I probably don’t need to point out that the name photographers most readily imitated this way are precisely those who learned the most from snapshot photography in the first place, such as William Eggleston in the top example. We don’t have to imitate any existing photographer. Really, there’s no point, because the snapshot corpus has a lot else in it. It has so much in it that it also contains, must contain, “equivalents” of the work of any number of other art photographers who might have existed, but, as it happens, didn’t. The snapshot collector’s question should be, if I can put it this way: Which of them should I imitate? It is also possible to imitate a more nameless but pervasive contemporary look, as in the second example. (I think I can guarantee, by the way, that the resemblance is fortuitous. On the back, in an immature handwriting, is this inscription: “Oshin, Oshin & Kym on the boat 8-31 / Lake Havasu.”) And it is possible not to imitate that look. Snapshots contain many, many more, including ones that have never been seen for what they are. The snapshot collector’s question should be: Which of them should I imitate? Finally, it’s all too easy to imitate other snapshot collectors. In the last example I have tried to imitate the most influential contemporary snapshot style, that of Robert Jackson. The style is so solid that it sometimes seems necessary, as if it were not a found-photo style at all but an objective characterization of snapshot photography: it sometimes seems to be simply a presentation of something in the world, something “out there.” But it isn’t. Robert created it, with his mind. It could have been something else, except that he is who he is. Considered most broadly, imitation is something you don’t want to get rid of: cultural transmission couldn’t happen without it. There’s no bright line between an artist who imitates and one who is (productively) influenced, or between an artist who isn’t doing anything new and one who is carrying on a tradition. An artist who imitates is probably one who loves, and love is a good thing. But here I am stressing the possibilities of snapshots. Have snapshots been understood? Do we have their measure? Are they known? I don’t think so. Snapshots are rich—plenty rich enough that, to the extent that we stop imitating, what we choose will reflect who we are. In principle, they are a true medium. To repeat last week’s question: Is this medium getting plowed under before we’ve even had a chance to explore it properly?

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