Is snapshot collecting true collecting?

In one form or another the urge to collect is commonplace—far more so than the urge to have nothing, which would have to be judged a reaction (yes, I feel it sometimes). In its most refined expressions, the collecting impulse is responsible for some great feats of civilization: libraries and museums, zoos and botanical gardens, encyclopedias and dictionaries. But I would guess that collecting is an anthropological universal—that it is not specifically connected with the cultures in our lineage, the ones in which those feats have been achieved. However banal it may be as a psychological trait, the drive to collect is dark and deep. It is not open to introspection, so nothing we can say about it ever seems to really touch it. In a given individual it can be very strong; we are helpless before it, and enduringly baffled, just the way we are before our most powerful animal instincts. Collecting seems human, and, like so much of what is human, at least slightly embarrassing. A wilder, less civilized variant, perhaps, is the urge to hoard. The popular fascination with hoarding may show that it is a derangement of something everyone can recognize. If simply having, and enlarging, an iTunes trove does something for you that listening to the music (much as you may love music) does not, you understand collecting. It is possible to question whether a snapshot collector, at least the kind of snapshot collector I’ve been discussing, is a collector in the ordinary sense. In my own case, which may be typical, I’d say snapshot collecting is about aesthetic novelty. I want to surprise myself, and ideally enlarge, not my holdings—that would be tedious—but my idea of what a photo is. Surprise can’t last, of course. When surprise turns to boredom, there may be no residue of “enlargement,” and so photos can leave my collection as easily as they enter it. Old photos fall off the back as new ones climb on the front; my collection is an evolving representation of an evolving taste. So acquiring a picture is not like acquiring a stamp, or an art object. It is more like making an art object, in the sense that a new picture is or should be a quite personal aesthetic advance. It gives me something to think about. What does it mean that I like this picture? Does it really get me anywhere? Do I want to go there? Can I make something out of it in the long run? Is it really interesting, or just a kick? Very often I buy experimentally: at any given time many pictures are in limbo while I think about them and decide if they do anything important for me. And since in fact no picture ever gets completely out of limbo, I think my collection is pretty nebulous as an entity. I bought this artfully tinted photo recently. It’s really not in my line, since it belongs to one of the few classes of certifiable non-accident in snapshots, but—perhaps partly for that very reason—I find I can’t get rid of it, and I may think of a way to incorporate it. The fact that we collect actual snapshots, not images, shows once again that we understand snapshots as objects. Only objects scratch the itch. We make the distinction unconsciously: we demand a real photo taken by a real person, a real survival from the real moment it depicts. We could collect images—an iTunes download, or an LP, isn’t a one-of-a-kind object, after all—but we don’t. The question remains: why do I need to have such an object? Couldn’t I be visually surprised by it as I say I need to be without actually acquiring it? Why can’t I be “enlarged” by just seeing it? My answer is that owning a photo makes me take it seriously. Having it is as close as I can come to having made it myself. That’s not to say I can’t be helped by another collector’s picture, just as an artist can by another artist’s work. But in order to be helped by it I need to understand it in the context of the other collector’s collection, or at least in the context of what I understand of his or her taste. That is, the other collector has to “have” it. It has to be owned by someone, taken fully seriously by another snapshot collector, preferably one I respect, if I am going to feel the full force of it. I don’t think influence works this way for stamp collectors.

Roll over to enlarge