Small blunt instruments

I said earlier that the small size of snapshots is something that has to be worked with. It is perhaps the most conspicuous thing about them. Even though it is in a sense secondary—an adjunct to their purpose, their function as cheap personal mementos—it is number one among their sensory qualities. If we had to describe snapshots to someone who didn’t know what they were, we would probably say they were small before we said anything else. As I pointed out, snapshot size can be harnessed straightforwardly. But the opposite impulse, some feeling that snapshots must compensate in one way or another for their relatively weak optical impact, probably afflicts most collectors. Even a photographically informed eye will often permit simplicities and crudities that would never pass muster in a larger photo. Snapshot size may actually have had a pernicious effect on received snapshot values (there are such things). One case in point is that of overstatement. The first example measures 2¼” by 3⅜” (the inscription on the verso reads “abgesch. engl. Panzer”— “knocked-out English tank”). The picture is really all about extremity, and about finding it in the composition. There’s nothing else there, and that would not be enough to carry a larger print. Is it enough to carry this small one? Needless to say, snapshot collecting is a highly personal and various thing, and even a given collector’s taste doesn’t stand still. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to generalize, to average the reigning snapshot aesthetic, so to speak. And I’d say overstatement of all kinds is common, even held in high esteem. To put it more strongly: snapshot taste leans toward the sensational. Snapshots that are aggressively freakish and/or over-the-top in effect or implication are popular. My diagnosis is a sort of Napoleon complex, a sense on the part of collectors that snapshots lack something and in compensation need something. It may be felt that there’s not much danger, because the whole problem is that the physical modesty of snapshots lowers their overall temperature. But obviously judgments will differ on how far. In any case I sometimes let the tradeoff stand. Garry Winogrand declared that it’s a photo’s job to dramatize, and I have to agree. Just the same, I will tell you that I yearn for subtlety in snapshots, and in a strange way their delicacy as visual stimuli just puts that further out of reach. If you are so quiet that you feel you have to shout to be heard, you are always shouting, no matter what your absolute or relative volume might actually be. I think it’s very possible that the best way to achieve subtle effects with snapshots is by assembling them: that is, by exploiting context (as I tried to do here). The small size of snapshots seems to make all sorts of things more acceptable than they might be. I’ve mentioned the case of meaningless technical flash (here). Similarly, the second example (3” by 4¾”) is just a one-liner. But a one-liner can seem all right when there’s only room for one line. In a sense all three of these examples are one-liners. Finally, the simplicity of the third shot (3½” by 5”) would not scale up in a larger picture. There it would just seem to be boring. I also think this photo would become more obviously pretentious if it were much larger.

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