Neighboring genres, Part II

In addition to all those small photos that seem clearly not to have been made by professionals, there are some enigmatic small photos that may or may not have been made by professionals, or might even have been made by people whose professionalism was fuzzy in its very essence, fuzzy to the core. Here are a few examples of that, to me, especially delicious class of pictures. All are 4” x 5” or under. Two are portraits of some sort. The third seems to be a darkroom experiment, for what purpose, at what level of sophistication, and with what success we will never know. The fact that this and the other groups of photos I mentioned last week are readily accepted as snapshots by me and people like me shows as clearly as anything could that we are not really specialists in the same spirit as collectors of daguerreotypes, say, or cabinet cards. I know of no snapshot purists—collectors who demand that a “snapshot” must be a snapshot. We just want a found image. Whether or not a picture actually satisfies somebody’s definition of a snapshot is beside the point. That point is the absence of professionalism, because as professionalism exits, accident enters. And we need accident, in at least one of the senses I’ve discussed. A daguerreotype or a cabinet card can of course have “found” qualities, as many objects do. A daguerreotype might have undergone chemical degradation that gives it an interesting look; a cabinet card might depict someone whose face intrigues us for whatever reason. But both are made by professionals, whose intentions in genres this narrow are never in doubt. In my examples the primary fact that we don’t quite know how much to credit the photographers with allows us (just barely, but that’s the fun part) to impose our own meanings. In almost-presentable, technically not-too-bad cases like these, “Duchampian” accident is the most important kind: the main thing is to have a (to some degree) indeterminate image that can be appropriated by a finder eager to “occupy” it. A photo that we know is professional has already been spoken for. Along with accident, another thing that enters as professionalism exits is the absence of professionalism. We may like that for its own sake, and I think most snapshot collectors do. Lisette Model and Stephen Shore were right: it is possible to enjoy snapshots (and now it can be understood that I am using the word as a sort of shorthand) for their simplicity—for their clarity, in a certain sense. Unlike the pros, the snapshooters don’t mess with us, even a little: “we” don’t exist for them. As I’ve pointed out, the wonderful mystery of snapshots depends on that clarity. This is no paradox: the mystery is what remains after we have used snapshot clarity to see what we can see—after we have believed in the snapshot image as earnestly as snapshots allow us to do. So it seems to me that the clarity and the mystery of snapshots are byproducts of their lack of professionalism. But in the end, the mere absence of professionalism is not enough: it doesn’t necessarily look like anything. Snapshots still have to make sense as photos, and that takes luck—positive luck in attracting favorable accidents, and also negative luck in repelling the unfavorable ones. It is easy to miss the importance of negative luck, though anyone who looks at a lot of unsorted snapshots sees many, many unfavorable accidents. Neither kind of luck happens very much to daguerreotypes or cabinet cards or any photos that are not rooted in accident, which is most of them—to photos made by people who deliberately wield the state of the art to connect intention to marketable result.

Roll over to enlarge