Mortal tedium

Most snapshots are banal, and I don’t necessarily mind that, but I don’t want a boring picture in my collection. These are hardly precise terms, but bear with me while I distinguish them. Before I get to the point I want to be as clear as it is possible to be about boringness, which is such an important part of our experience of snapshots: at least for those of us who find the bottom of the snapshot food chain a fruitful place to be, boredom is a condition of life. When we say a snapshot is banal, we probably mean something about its subject, or about the circumstances of its making on the evidence of what we can see. Boringness can have to do with a photo’s pictorial qualities above and beyond that, but in any case it mostly has to do with how we feel. So banality is probably about them, about the snapshooters and what they chose to snap, and boringness is probably about us, about the viewers and what we like to view. We can make an easy judgment about banality that nearly everyone will be able to agree with; boringness is more individual, but I think we can still say that almost all snapshots are boring—the non-collector who sees only the gems in books or shows may not realize how horribly true this is. Usually snapshots are both banal and boring. Most remarkable snapshots, the ones that get into people’s collections, are banal but not boring. The rare snapshot that is not banal is probably also not boring for that reason. I didn’t want to illustrate this post with a boring snapshot (that would have been boring). The next choice was one of those scarce non-banal, non-boring snapshots. An example with sensational subject matter—sex, death, what have you—would have been too easy. This one escapes banality (and boringness) through abstraction: the world it shows us is not the familiar household or holiday full of random clutter, but some stripped-down realm of smoke and cinder. Now my point. It is very possible to feel that searching for snapshots that aren’t boring is in a sense doing an injustice to the great pool of almost entirely boring snapshots. It’s perfectly true that anyone who approaches snapshots the way snapshot collectors approach them will arrive at something unrepresentatively interesting. But how can we be interested in what isn’t interesting? The answer is that the word “boring” as I am using it really means “visually boring,” whereas even visually boring snapshots are full of potentially interesting information—information about their subjects and eras and information about snapshot photography itself. Snapshots contain material for an academic history of the way people pose in them, for example; we've all noticed fads and fashions in poses over a scale of decades (I discussed some here). But visually such a history would be thin soup at best, at least if it stuck to its topic. It would be about something in the pictures, not the pictures themselves. As far as I can see, the way snapshot collectors go at snapshots is the only way to extract visual pleasure from them. Pleasure is what it’s all about. We all have distinct tastes, but we are all in the business of finding something in snapshots that, statistically speaking, is barely there; our awareness of that rarity is in fact part of the feeling of foundness. A while back I compared collecting snapshots to picking up nice rocks on the beach. With the important exception that rocks don’t have a former life as meaningful objects, the analogy is pretty good. When we pick up a rock or find a snapshot, we are taking aesthetic pleasure in a freak occurrence—and not taking it in a million other occurrences that don’t rise to that level of freakishness. Is a beachcomber who picks up an especially nice rock somehow being unfair to all the other rocks? A geologist might think so, but a geologist just has a different project.

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