Multiple images

A snapshot we like is a thing taken out of context. It can never stop being a snapshot, of course, because it can never stop having been taken by a snapshot camera. But it stops being what it originally was to anyone connected with it—to the people who took it, appeared in it, kept it, inherited it. Suppose someone not part of that original community of meaning has found a certain snapshot, and values it. Along with the snapshot itself, the finder has found a new way of valuing it. That snapshot has lost one meaning and gained another. And: the second meaning has partly to do with the loss of the first. Consider multiple images, by which I mean combinations of related images recorded by the same camera. Multiple images can be superimposed, printed side by side, or discrete: that is, they can be double or multiple exposures, panel (composite) photos, or series. In the way they are used by snapshot collectors, multiple exposures are usually a late avatar of Surrealist disjunctive imagery. “As beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”: this is the stock Lautréamont quote often used by André Breton and Max Ernst and repeated even more often today as an encapsulation of Surrealist practice. (The problem with this to my mind is that sewing machines, umbrellas, and operating tables aren’t different enough to make their “meeting” very interesting, but no matter.) Many photographers have superimposed images to more or less the same purpose as the Surrealist photographers; Jerry Uelsmann may be the most recent example of note, although I believe his star has fallen pretty far since the 1960s. Our feeling about multiple exposures in snapshots may be something like our feeling about Uelsmann—that the effects tend to be cheap. Disjunction is a wonderful tool (and anyone who exploits contrast in creating an arrangement of items is putting disjunction to work), but I usually find double exposures too showy to use seriously. My example is not disjunctive; the constituent images have fused without residue into a third, new image. Panel imagery is vanishingly rare in art photography—Duane Michals might belong in the “series” camp—though many painters use panels. In the hands of someone like Max Beckmann, the reference is specifically ecclesiastical. More recently, people like David Salle, who couldn’t live without panels, have again taken their inspiration from Surrealism; I believe snapshot collectors do the same. In this example the constituent images are (or were) identical, but they needn’t be. Either way, snapshot images printed together on the same sheet were usually intended to be cut apart. So to display them together and find meaning in the aggregation is in a sense an abuse (and of course a further abuse has been committed in this case). Series are underexplored by snapshot collectors. I note what may be obvious, that in my example the “real” sequence is unknown. Smile before frown, or frown before smile? It happened one way or the other. But I prefer it this way. I said that the meaning we impose on snapshots has partly to do with the loss of the first. I insist on this idea. We like not just our interpretation, but misinterpretation. We are in the business of adding meaning. We may not always realize that’s what we’re doing, but in the case of multiple images it’s impossible to miss: here we are knowingly supplying meaning where there was none.

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