Meta-shit

A snapshot goes into my collection for one reason and one reason only: because I like it. No one is telling me what to like. There are no standards at all other than personal ones, and the random element means the category is capacious enough that there are many, many different things to like in it. Under those circumstances snapshot collectors all have different projects. At best there are ephemeral subcommunities of shared interest. For example, views of people turned away from the camera are in fashion as of this writing; double exposures were once sought after but are currently in a deep trough; tinted snapshots are a minority taste but may yet catch on. There are all sorts of subtler trends and affinities to do with form, with subject, or with intangibles of feeling. If they ever got to be universal, these alignments of individual temperaments would amount to standards: if everyone agreed that rear views were important, for example. But that’s not going to happen. The individual temperaments run this show. Snapshots aren’t art photos, as we know, but in this respect there is an obvious comparison. Collecting snapshots is like making art in that it is driven by the evolving aesthetic choices—it is the evolving aesthetic activity—of individuals at ground level. It is less like collecting art, because that relies on standards created top-down by the market and the history of art. Certainly it’s possible that, after enough museum and gallery exposure, a real market will appear and a newly legitimized, aboveground snapshot practice will seem to settle on something—will collectively decide on what’s important within that immense and varied pool. But that would be a sort of academy of snapshots. It would be an orthodoxy essentially imposed from above, and in the long run the collectors wouldn’t accept it. Down here in the trenches, we simply can’t agree about what’s worth having, any more than artists can agree about what’s worth making. I’ll come back to this idea later. Snapshots are a free-for-all, but it’s natural to want standards. Everyone wants community: we all belong to those “clubs” of shared interest (they would appear in any reasonably complex field of endeavor). But for a real precedent or point of reference, you’d have to appeal to outside authority—to think of snapshots in relation to art photography and in that way anchor them in existing practice. It would actually be pretty difficult not to let your taste in snapshots be influenced by your taste in other kinds of photography. That was what I was doing unconsciously when I noticed the first snapshot, and I still do it today, if in a more conscious and limited way. Existing photographic ideas can be incorporated into snapshots as what you’d call influence, as deliberate allusion, or as random echoes that the finder noticed, but especially in the last two cases I’ve become impatient: there is such a thing as a cliché. For my money, masks or kids with guns, say, have been done to death in straight photography and just can’t be used at all anymore, no matter how common they are in snapshots in the wild. Tolerance for photographic chestnuts varies hugely, though, and I can only imagine that has to do with how seriously snapshot collectors take the wider photographic world. One contested category is that of meta-shit. A friend of mine, now dead, used this term to mean self-referentiality, especially in art. His way of describing it shows clearly enough that he thought it was tedious, as perhaps it is. I associate the most recent vogue for meta-shit with the 1960s and its penumbra, the later artists influenced by the period. In photography, the classical 1960s shadows, reflections, cameras, screens, and photos of photos of Lee Friedlander are meta-shit: pictures that can’t resist telling you they know they’re pictures. As I read those photos, they are currently on the cusp between dated and canonical. Shadows, reflections, cameras, screens, and photos of photos are popular with snapshot collectors: there is a meta-shit club. I’m sure many of those collectors have art photographers like Friedlander in mind. Others may believe they have identified a significant element of the snapshot corpus, one that would exist regardless of the parallel in art photography. For me meta-shit in snapshots is a straightforward allusion, and a rather threadbare one, like kids with guns. My growing resistance to it may show that I am understanding snapshots more and more on their own terms, as I believe it’s important to do. I am certainly less likely to think an echo of art photography is fun or interesting just because it crops up.

Roll over to enlarge