Relationships

Everyone notices snapshot intimacy. The snapshot eye’s easy infiltration into the most private zones entranced one faction of 1960s “snapshot aesthetic” photographers; Diane Arbus, for example, worked hard to replicate the intimacy that snapshots achieved without any effort at all. The snapshot eye doesn’t stand on ceremony. It’s on first-name terms with people, because its roles are those of the inner circle: it’s a family chronicler, a dutiful witness, a snoop, a pest, a friend, a lover, and more. And because it lives on the inside, it has the inside dirt. A snapshot already knows things about its subject, whereas a more formal photo labors to discover them. When it comes to psychological attunement, snapshots have it all over even the most serious portraiture. Apart from home movies, which are functionally just snapshots many times a second, there’s not much in other media that gives us the same feeling of privileged access. Diaries and letters come the closest, perhaps. But if snapshot intimacy is so striking to us, it’s because we can’t help comparing snapshots to professional photographs, which were always more formal until snapshots taught them otherwise (and usually still are); there isn’t anything professional and more formal to compare diaries and letters to. Why did such a thing appear in photography? Obviously because the snapshot camera had a different kind of user, who had a different kind of relationship with the subject. Snapshot intimacy is not a style: it reflects something real. What Arbus did to bring intimacy into her pictures was to actually get to know her subjects the way snapshooters know theirs. A snapshot is free to reflect precisely the degree of intimacy of the real-life situation that produced it. Another kind of photo will not usually be founded on a personal relationship at all, but in any case it will not be free to reflect one, even if the camera is fully portable and can in principle follow the subject anywhere. A professional photo, whether it’s an art photo, a commercial portrait, a mugshot, or something else, generally has no reason to penetrate a life the way a snapshot does, and the shoot is like a visit from a plumber or to a lawyer: a regular part of the photographer’s life, perhaps, but no one else’s. Unlike the typical snapshot relationship, the professional photographer’s relationship with the subject is a nonce relationship if it is one at all. It didn’t exist before the shoot and will not continue later. But consider the case of someone like Charles Dodgson. Dodgson was never a professional photographer; he was a gentleman–experimenter in an era when such a thing was possible. There was no professional barrier between him and his young subjects, who were often “child-friends” with a presence in his life outside the shoot, so in some ways he was like a snapshot photographer. Nevertheless, his pictures still could not represent his relationships directly in a snapshot-like way. They were governed by the conventions of Victorian portraiture, and the unwieldiness of the equipment doubly ensured that the picture-taking was not well integrated into the lives: it was extra, so to speak, confined to special occasions designed for it. By contrast, a snapshot can depict, from the inside, an actual episode from an ongoing relationship. It can be an episode from an ongoing relationship. At this point we get into some very snapshotty territory. The snapshot camera, unlike any other camera, is an ordinary part of ordinary people’s lives, and actually accomplishes ordinary things between them—­just as a household object like a frying pan or a telephone does, with the obvious difference that a camera records the moment in which it does what it does (namely, recording the moment) and we have a chance to see what happened. Like a meal or a conversation, the act of taking a snapshot can be an everyday personal transaction; other kinds of photos don’t work that way. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this picture is as spontaneous as it looks and that it’s not a self-portrait. As in the “intrusive camera” example, the subject has apparently overwhelmed the snapshooter—in real life as well as in the photo; this couldn’t happen in a professional shoot—and has to some extent taken control of the shot. The picture mirrors an episode in a real, fluid, two-way relationship and is ultimately part of it in a way that a more “authorial” photo could never be. The same is subtly true of most snapshots of people.

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