Public and private

You’ve got your snapshots, you’ve got your found photos, and then you’ve got your institutional readings of the genre. Snapshots must pass through the shadowy but extraordinarily cohesive world of snapshot collectors in order to reach the big time and the public eye, but that doesn’t mean the snapshot impresarios who present the pictures think the same way about them as the collectors who supply them. Snapshots have in fact been interpreted and reinterpreted over the years for the benefit of the public, even as snapshot collectors continue to understand them as they always did. Where are we today? Are people being allowed to see snapshots the way collectors do? Snapshots were first presented to the general public as found photos in the 1970s, after the “snapshot aesthetic” photographers of the 1960s—Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, and the rest—had opened our eyes to them as photography. Since that time we have seen a fair number of major shows and books of anonymous snapshots taken from one collection or another. These have often been sophisticated productions, but they’ve rarely been directly shaped by the collector, and in no case has the work of the collector (beyond the mere fact of his or her existence as the person who accumulated the photos) been fully recognized. I’ve heard the idea expressed (especially by those with specifically photographic orientations) that snapshots “don’t go far enough”—that they are, quite simply, limited. Well, the people who say that can’t be faulted for not knowing how very personal snapshots can be: for not having been made aware of how immense and varied the underlying snapshot corpus is and how much a strong eye can do with it. We have no objective basis for singling out any snapshot. It’s all subjective: we’re just choosing something we like. The pool is so vast, so anonymous, and owes so much to chance that it couldn’t be any other way; choosing a snapshot is really precisely like picking up a nice rock on the beach, if a rock could have as much formal, emotional, and historical texture as a photograph. Or, perhaps more to the point: choosing a snapshot is like taking a photograph. Winogrand claimed all he did was say yes, and a snapshot collector is saying yes in just the same sense. No one has faced this truth squarely, and in fact it has often been obscured. But among its consequences is that any found photo is tied to the eye that chose it. Someone’s eye, a personal aesthetic, gave it meaning; it remains an expression of that aesthetic. So a snapshot show or book that draws on a reasonably well-directed collection, unless it tries to do justice to the collector’s eye, is making a complete mess. This lack of clarity about authorship, which has lately become extreme, is probably a lot of what has kept snapshots as marginal as they are: without an artist, they don’t make sense as art. A naïve but thoughtful gallery or museum visitor standing in front of a snapshot labeled simply “Photographer Unknown” or described as “vernacular photography” will be justifiably confused about whose creative imagination is at work here. Where did the art part come from? Did it just appear? If it crosses your mind to wonder who said this picture belongs on those white walls, you are beginning to feel something is wrong. I’m sure plenty of people do. You will say that the value of all art is inherently a subjective thing—that there’s no way to anchor an aesthetic taste in something that isn’t ultimately arbitrary; and of course you’re right. And now we come to something else preventing snapshots from truly engaging with photography and catching on as art in good standing. Art markets function because they have eliminated the eye of the beholder, or at least well enough to make them happy—through an appeal to authority. To be worth money, to hold the promise of being worth more money in the future, and thus to be noticed at all, art generally needs to have an artist’s name associated with it, or at least a provenance—a pedigree of some sort. Snapshots don’t have either, and can’t have either as long as the collector is left out of consideration. Imagine what would have happened to the Vivian Maier find if the material had been scattered and anonymous, like snapshots. Great as the individual pictures may be, they wouldn’t have been commercially exciting without at least a hypothetical artist’s hand uniting them. And these are regular photos, not a fringy subgenre that doesn’t even seem to have artists in the usual sense. But lately the art establishment has found an easier way to make money out of snapshots, and that is to popularize them: to present them simply as fun objects from the past—made by people, full of humor and history, but not really art at all. At the same time the suggestion that they just might be the art of the people who made them is allowed to hang in the air. The idea isn’t openly stated (it wouldn’t hold up), and so the central problem of whose art they are, which has only one coherent solution, is never really dealt with. But the effect of all the confusion and photographic triviality is to take snapshots off the table as real photography. That’s where they are today. In retrospect, Thomas Walther’s Other Pictures show of 2000, curated by the Met’s Mia Fineman, was the public snapshot event that came the closest to acknowledging the authorship of the collector. It was the first and only snapshot production to demonstrate clearly that a snapshot collection could have a look, though admittedly its look was no more than an imitation of the existing Modernist look admired by the collector. That show might have been a beginning, but it was an end. Since that time a slow softening has set in, one that looks irreversible; I’ll be surprised if we see another museum or gallery show or a legit book as serious as the Walther–Fineman show was more than two decades ago. The integrity of a phenomenon like Nick Osborn’s once and future website Square America proves the point: Square America would not have been possible except as a private operation outside the art establishment. Snapshot collecting has always been a largely underground activity. Even if it’s entirely underground, it will continue. No one’s going to stop us from doing what we do. I even think it might be freeing to just ignore public snapshots, since they seem to want to go their own way. Nevertheless, this is a terribly strange state of affairs. Collectors are doing something artlike with snapshots, but the art world is determined to do something else with them—even as its only source is us, the snapshot collectors. After a brief moment of dithering a couple of decades ago, those who are supposed to have their eyes open for new uses of materials have decided, as one, that they don’t accept our material, snapshots, as material at all. I find this plain weird.

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