Irony and badness

The technical unruliness that forms a snapshot takes it away from the photographer, but our pleasure in the unintended effect is what gives it to us. An ironic interpretation of a picture is likewise all ours; irony contributes to a feeling of foundness. Targets for irony are very common in snapshots. For some people snapshot irony is fun, especially when it’s directed at the successive corninesses we now find in post-1940s eras, but to me it’s distracting, an alien element. And it’s trite. We don’t need snapshots for irony—it’s everywhere—whereas we don’t have another stochastic mechanism that gives us what snapshots do. What we want most is images that couldn’t have been produced any other way, and that is certainly not true of pictures with nothing going for them but, perhaps, an ironic view of a “Leave It to Beaver”-ish past, which is something we can easily find on a refrigerator magnet. Irony as I understand it is a jab: the ironist doesn’t accept something and is saying so. But it’s not a straightforward kind of jab. You have an ironic attitude (toward a photo, let’s say, or, if you’re the photographer, toward your subject) if you pretend to “celebrate” and perhaps even truly enjoy what, one level down, you feel or want to feel in some way superior to. Anything “retro” is soliciting this kind of attitude. For us Bettie Page, for example, is not the original Bettie Page but “Bettie Page,” a kicky period joke. Irony can of course be gentle, even affectionate. But the greater the difference between the surface feeling and the implied criticism, the more vicious the overall effect; the levels are what make irony “sophisticated.” Irony may seem sophisticated—it’s certainly very contemporary—but it’s like sentimentality in that it gives the viewer false comfort. The ironist is not content to be an eye, but needs to be a critic; the ironist not only wants to be better than someone else, but thinks that’s fine. Irony in this sense can be rescued as far as I am concerned—at least to some extent—by displacing it a bit and putting it to use for roughly political purposes, as in the photos of Robert Frank. Snapshots lend themselves to “retro” irony in particular because the classical snapshot era coincides with the postwar period, prime territory for the familiar modern-day ironies of Bettie and Beav, of bongo drums and bell bottoms, of all the music and fashions and colors and ideas of decades that have faded but haven’t quite faded away (I included an example earlier—here—and that is enough for this blog). It’s easy to imagine that the past was a naïve and foolish place; irony in forms such as camp and deliberate kitsch or corn is often tangled up with nostalgia. But, more broadly, the ironic attitude is permitted by distance, by any perceived gap in sensibilities that the viewer actually gets a kick out of. Contemporary photography is full of this more general irony—mixtures of free-floating mockery and merry revulsion that don’t particularly have to do with the passage of time (Larry Sultan’s photos of the pornography industry in the San Fernando Valley are an example). Similarly, all sorts of people take and appear in snapshots, whereas a much more specific kind of person looks at snapshots the way we are looking at them. Snapshots give us, among much else, images of people doing things we wouldn’t do, being ways we wouldn’t be. The things and ways now buried in the past are just the most overwhelming ones. In any case there is a great deal in snapshots to laugh at or be pleasantly horrified by in the modern fashion. But all that has nothing to do with snapshots specifically. Could it be that all snapshots are in a sense ironic? They were made with inferior equipment and are thus by definition comparatively “bad,” after all; often they are grotesquely bad, due to both human and technical failings. It would certainly be possible to think of them as junk and prize them, ironically, for that reason. But that is not what I am doing (and I venture to say that is not what most snapshot collectors are doing). I don’t measure snapshots against a “better” kind of photography. Normally I don’t even really think about their human and technical basis, which presumably wasn’t what it might have been—I simply accept the images as givens, the output of that impersonal machinery of snapshot variation. This is a bad photo, if you like, but I find it truly peculiar and fascinating. There is nothing to make fun of in it, in fact nothing much at all. A picture with so little of interest in it, a picture that apparently had no reason to have been taken and yet was, probably could not be anything but a snapshot.

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