No. 1

This is the first snapshot I noticed. I found it in 1982, in an antique shop on Judah Street in San Francisco. Until that moment I’d never imagined it was possible to see a snapshot as something other than just someone’s family photo. How did I see it? At the time I couldn’t have said. The picture simply moved me, and I bought it. From this vantage point I can say I didn’t see that original snapshot as an art photo. I knew it was, precisely, someone’s family photo, possibly taken during a European vacation. But it had some qualities that were a lot like the art photography I knew. More than that, it had acquired them accidentally, as far as I could tell. In a sense it was better than an art photo, than any art photo, because it left room for me. It was letting me be the one to notice it and elevate it. It was letting me make it completely mine. Even now I think this is a remarkable and baffling image, with its jigsaw puzzle of uninterpretable shadows and highlights, its refusal to map into a plausible three-dimensional scene, and, most thrillingly, the ambiguously laden gesture of the subject at left, suggesting grief or shame or self-defense but possibly only a hand raised against glare. That wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to make the picture more like an art photo, and I cut the quarter-inch borders off it. I didn’t understand anything about snapshots.

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