Life

There are people who like snapshots simply as evidence of past lives. If this is how you feel, you may be truly moved by an unassuming view of someone now dead, perhaps by little more than the fact that this very person you are looking at lived and died, laughed and cried, had a life full of life, and is survived, for all you know survived only, by this very trace of them that somehow found its way to you. This isn’t enough for coldhearted formalists like me. We unfortunates need a real picture—a photo that engages the eye sort of the way other kinds of photographs do—in order to appreciate, or even really see, what’s going on in it. I say “sort of” because, as I’ve pointed out often, a snapshot is its own kind of photograph, with its own ways of engaging the eye. We can tell ourselves that those formal properties exist apart from the banal subjects and get interested in them for their own sake—and snapshot collectors often do that—but the truth is that snapshots are put together the way they are partly because of what they did for people in real life, banal subjects and all. I made this point earlier in connection with the two sides of a snapshot: the back was part of the picture for the snapshooters, that fact is frozen into the object as a whole, and so the back is part of the picture for us (or it can be or should be). Now I’m going to reapply that “form follows function” idea to a different aspect of snapshot form: snapshot point of view. Snapshots bring us into past lives with some immediacy not simply because they represent pictorial evidence of those past lives, but because the snapshooter’s extraordinarily vivid point of view, deposited in a picture, can become our point of view. I’ve discussed a number of aspects of point of view in snapshots. One way to sum things up is to say that a snapshot is as close to the action as a photo can get, because the snapshooter was part of the action. A snapshot doesn’t observe a real-life situation. It emerges from the midst of it, and we really believe that when we see the image: there is no professional detachment or artifice to get in the way and no artsy agenda to confuse things. As an analogy, consider combat photography, which has been with us as a professional genre since the mid–nineteenth century. What is missing from the photographic record is the soldier’s point of view. Obviously the soldiers have always been too busy to take snapshots in combat, but think how strong they would be. If a bayonet could take pictures, imagine what they would feel like. Ordinary snapshots come from the front lines of real life; by contrast, a professional might be embedded with the troops, so to speak, and watch at some remove, or at best try to imitate the real snapshots. Finally: the snapshooter’s palpable involvement in the realest of real life surrounding the camera means that we ourselves can feel implicated when we look at a snapshot. That’s an interesting property for a photograph to have. I chose the first example in part because it is in some ways very ordinary, so ordinary that it can almost stand in for all snapshots. But it is a lovely, subtle, funny, and ultimately rather frightening picture. Some of the drama in it comes from the contrast between the man’s complex expression, made up of pride, humor, and a high proportion of something else, and the child’s simple one, vacant of everything but bewilderment. One also has to imagine the person behind the camera, undoubtedly the mother; finally one goes back to the subjects’ expressions and tries to interpret them in that light. That assertive triangle of implication, pointed right at us, is very snapshotty. The point of view is sucking us into the picture, and in this case that’s not a completely uncomfortable place to be. In the second example, I believe the two subjects traded places and snapped each other, though the double exposure was an accidental improvement on their separate shots. So the actual point of view is distributed, split down the middle (possibly even the camera itself was joint property); and in reconstructing the situation we are likewise split down the middle. In principle two art photographers could do something like this, but I don’t think anyone has. The final example is very far from the intimacy of the first one. But the point of view is still as personal as that of any snapshot: an art photographer wouldn’t be drawn this far into a touchy situation. The picture does much more than show this confrontation, because the snapshooter wasn’t just watching it. Even in the work of art photographers trying to achieve the effects of snapshot photography in one way or another, I don’t believe I have felt such a direct and visceral challenge.

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