Misery

“All photographs are memento mori.” Susan Sontag noticed this in 1977. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” The idea was reformulated a few years later by Roland Barthes (I discussed his version here). A photograph makes immortal what is not immortal. We know perfectly well it’s a lie, so to that extent any photograph (at least one of a person) is about death. It’s about death: I mean that a certain kind of mind will have good reason to feel death implied in any photograph, and that some degree of background deadliness may color anyone’s experience of photography. In his notoriously uncomprehending New Yorker review of The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (you can read it here), John Updike puts the Sontag quote close to the top. It’s just a grand-sounding lead-in; the idea stalls out there and does not return until the next-to-last sentence, where Updike refers to the collector’s (Robert Jackson’s) “macabre traffic in silver-based shadows.” But is this really the same idea? Surely Updike is talking about the practice of collecting snapshots specifically, because at this point there wouldn’t be any reason to say that all photo collectors traffic in the macabre. What does he mean? Possibly nothing, apart from the gratuitous insult. But I think he is beginning to voice a feeling that makes sense. Of course snapshots are macabre, and of course snapshots are more macabre than other photographs: it may take an outsider to really feel the truth of that. Far more than in other photos, in snapshots we see people not just alive, but living, poignantly engaged in their lives—poignantly because we have to imagine them no longer doing that living and not alive at all. Also: when we collect snapshots, we strip corpses to get them, so to speak; in most cases they wouldn’t come our way without the deaths of the people shown in them and without the destruction of the households in which they originally functioned. Finally, they no longer exercise that function. Snapshots are themselves dead when they leave those households, until we reanimate them for our own ghoulish purposes. If a snapshot in its original habitat was alive, a found photo in someone’s collection is a zombie. I’ve more or less covered these points before, but I want to build on them to make a new one. Photographs (of people) are superficially about life; but, as I say, death shows through if we are inclined to see it. In the same way, snapshots are so determinedly, monotonously lighthearted that they seem to be hiding something. Snapshot cameras are, always were, tools for fun. They were officially meant for recording good times, even for being part of good times; and that’s when people brought them out, just as Kodak told them to do. But that gaiety so often seen in snapshots, the trace of moments positive enough that someone thought they were fit for the kind of photo a snapshot has always been supposed to be, is as false as the eternal life of the sitter in the photos that Sontag and Barthes were thinking of. Just as that photographic embalming hides, unsuccessfully, the death underneath, the happiness in snapshots is a paper-thin false front on the sufferings and horrors of the lives behind the pictures, an idealization shutting its eyes to all those moments that no one thought deserved to be photographed. Any photo is an embalming job; in the same way, a snapshot is a forced smile. Occasionally we can sense the phoniness of the gigantic “Say ‘cheese’” that is snapshot photography, and once in a long while we get a direct look at what’s behind it, but we can always be aware of it if we are so minded. Like the Sontag–Barthes idea, this one is hard to shake once it gets through to you. It’s also hard to shake the thought that snapshot collecting is actually “traffic” in human misery, to use Updike’s unpleasant word, just as though we collected limp balloons and dead flowers from hospital rooms. How can we deal with this?

Roll over to enlarge