“Innocence”

“Innocence is the quintessence of the snapshot,” Lisette Model believed. “The snapshot has no pretense or ambition. . . The picture isn’t straight. It isn’t done well. It isn’t composed. It isn’t thought out.” In fact snapshots are so innocent—innocent of pretense, ambition, concern with formal matters, all the things that art photos are presumably guilty of—that they are “closer to truth” than any other photographic images, she thought. In a similar vein, Stephen Shore feels that “the mediating voice of the artist” somehow distorts experience—mucks up the plain reality that we see without a camera and that a non-artist like a snapshot photographer is able to capture in what Shore calls the “undetermined image.” But nowadays “everyone has been so educated visually, and. . . people are striving so hard to make ‘good’ pictures, that it’s very hard to find that quality of the undetermined image.” Shore once tried to shoot like a snapshooter himself, to unlearn all his skills and all the conventions of his own brand of art photography in order to arrive at something more like what we actually see. A snapshot really is about its subject. We sense that unmistakably because the “treatment,” the formal part of the photo that an artist would care about, is so clearly beside the point in most cases. This is probably what Model means when she says a snapshot’s deficiencies bring it closer to truth. Model’s use of the word “innocence” seems to imply that she, who speaks of snapshots as though it’s someone else who takes them, and we, who are reading her words, are something other than innocent—“sophisticated,” perhaps. “Innocent” for Model and “undetermined” for Shore really mean “devoid of art manner,” which of course snapshots are, because (at least until someone finds them) they’re not art. Should artists really yearn for photos devoid of art manner? Well, they can yearn. But it seems clear that Shore’s project was doomed from the start, because an artist can never be innocent. An artist who is trying to take pictures that are only about their subject won’t get beyond taking pictures that are about being only about their subject. An artist qua artist can never be innocent, but artists are not always “on.” In my experience art photographers’ snapshots—that is, their family photos—usually look pretty much like anyone else’s. Everyone knows what snapshots are for. They have a function that is not the function of art; they have occasions that are not the occasions of art. So to say that snapshots are innocent is not a statement about the snapshooters. It is a statement about the purpose of snapshots, and that is why an art photo can go only so far in emulating snapshots. In this example the snapshooter tells us a good deal more about his relationship with the subject than he surely intended. The unconsciousness of his self-revelation of course makes the photo far more devastating than it would otherwise have been. Not at all incidentally, the snapshooter unwittingly made room for his own shadow in the composition, thereby bringing the picture even closer to truth.

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