Style: poses and posing

Snapshots were not intended as art, but that doesn’t mean there was no such thing as style in snapshots. I don’t want to say that snapshot style was conscious, or as conscious as aesthetic styles are. Nevertheless, if the history of art is in one sense a history of style, the history of snapshot photography can be viewed the same way. Style in snapshot photography was in part dictated by the real-world function of snapshots, and in part it led a life of its own. Either way, it was distinct from style in the contemporaneous art photography (though we can sometimes see mutual influence). Snapshot poses are one aspect of snapshot style. They are very different from poses in art photography, and much could be written about them. When snapshots depict people, which is most of the time, they tend to show someone we can assume was familiar to the snapshooter, but in novel surroundings or doing something special: Mom basting the turkey, the sorority at the lake. The information content of a snapshot usually resides in the fresh context given to that known quantity. So longish shots and full-length poses are the rule. Close-ups are relatively infrequent in snapshots, simply because they had nothing to contribute to the normal snapshot occasion. To a far greater extent than art photography, snapshot photography does not contemplate or examine anything, but rather documents a moment. Another example: early on, when snapshot cameras were still a novelty, posing was formal and self-conscious. Everything stopped when the camera came out—people look so very stiff in old photos that we are tempted to imagine that life itself was somehow stiffer back then. But posing has become increasingly casual—increasingly rare—as cameras have become more ubiquitous. We won’t bother to say “cheese” if everyone is always holding a camera, and the marauding snapshooters roaming among us don’t care if we do. The result is that poses have traded excessive stability for instability. The moment is less critical, and people caught off guard in photos are more common than they once were. I’ve mentioned a couple of cases of “functional” style in posing—style that follows from the way snapshot photography is used. But posing styles can also be arbitrary. For example, in early snapshots groups of women often arrange themselves horizontally—in a “chorus line”—and men vertically—in a pyramid. These poses have gone out of fashion so decisively that, when we see them in old photos, we can’t help realizing that styles of posing can be as antique as those of dress or coiffure. Another example is the “bigfoot” shot, in which the recumbent subject shows the foreshortened bottoms of his or her shoes or feet to the camera; this went out of style before 1940. Beach shots of women draped with kelp seem to end about 1930. Women these days rarely turn away from the camera to display their hair, as was popular until perhaps 1950. Where these posing motifs came from and how they were transmitted is a mystery to me. This example of a “distributed” pose belongs with the first group: it owes its existence to the nature of snapshot photography. The key once again is that, much more than a photograph necessarily has to be, this shot was intended to create a record of an occasion, of some sort of notable moment; the rest was secondary. Everybody was in the frame, and wasn’t that the main thing? In an art photo, the pose is orchestrated (or selected) by an art photographer, and an art photographer would not have permitted the seeming incoherence of this shot. Even a Nan Goldin, who documents personal moments in imitation of snapshots, or a Diane Arbus, who solicited static full-length poses like these, would not have dared. One last point. It’s easy to think that style in snapshots is merely conventional, since conscious formal innovation is generally alien to them. The poses in the first group—the chorus lines, pyramids, and so forth—are indeed just stereotyped camera behavior, though I’d say people in snapshots often strike them with some irony and humor. But the poses in the second group, including the one in the example, represent freedom from convention. The underlying purpose was everything, and the snapshooters found some astonishing ways of achieving it.

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