Snapshot technology: color

Competing snapshot color processes could coexist, but they all had limited lifetimes. A given process or version of a given process would be introduced abruptly, last perhaps a decade, and then be discontinued abruptly. Old color is gone forever. It doesn’t amount to a manner—a style we might be able to shoot in now, sentimentally or ironically, the way musicians might play in the styles of bygone eras. Old color is tied to old technology, which is outmoded and stays that way. Once more snapshot photography is unlike art photography, which lives in a less instantaneous technical present and thus has many more options; any popular market tends to be severely confined by recently made corporate decisions. William Eggleston, for example, has used dye transfer color since the early 1970s, and his palette has looked about the same since then. Snapshot color is more like movie color, which can’t afford to stand still but at any given moment tends to put all its eggs in one basket. And, as with movie color, the result for us, after enough time has gone by, is that each color process (and the look of the characteristic chemical degradation each color process is prey to) tends to evoke an era, to have a period feeling of its own. Just as that very specific Technicolor of the classical Technicolor westerns, encountered elsewhere, might make us think of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the precise look of any of the steps in the evolution of the Kodacolor process will take us back to the years when that look was the only color look there was. The snapshooters mostly couldn’t control their own pictures. That was part of the deal. The democratization of photography didn’t mean that ordinary people had more choice; just the opposite. Ordinary people could have photography on condition that they not have very much of it. Color was one of the many aspects of photography that they handed over to impersonal forces. A snapshot camera was a piece of popular technology, in this regard much like a car: highly commercial, evanescent, with ever-evolving components, and designed to give the consumer only so many variables to play with. The people who took snapshots probably didn’t always know just what kind of color they were going to get when they picked up their pictures at the drugstore, and they may not have liked it when they eventually saw it. But most likely they simply accepted it as the state of the art. The same conclusions apply to most other technical aspects of snapshot photography.

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