The back

It’s easy and natural to write on the back of a snapshot. We may have done it ourselves, and people have always done it: snapshots with something on the back are common, no matter how old they are or where they come from. In this example the German reads, Adolf Hitlers Flugzeug kurz vor der Landung: Adolf Hitler’s plane shortly before landing. With that bit of orientation, we realize that the upraised hands projecting into the frame on the front are probably Nazi salutes. A minor connection is made and the story of the photo is more complete. But I am most interested in the viewer’s experience: from the standpoint of someone taking in the object as a whole, the inscription imposes a strong narrative one-two. And it’s not first something, then something else—it’s first some, then more. First image, then amplification; first mild puzzle, then tentative solution; first photo as photo, then photo as history; first an interesting visual, then one shaded by everything we know about the Third Reich. Having read what’s on the back, we can’t just enjoy the image in an uncomplicated way anymore. It has changed, for good. A general arc more or less like this one is standard for image-inscription pairs in snapshots. The back modifies the front, though the overall effect varies hugely. The inscription—a name, a date, a line or two of useful or unuseful information, a short letter, part of a long letter, or any number of other things—can tell us what we wanted to know, or what we didn’t want to know. It can be intentionally or unintentionally funny. It can add more mystery, even be all the fun. It can add bafflement, by being irrelevant or illegible or in a language we don’t read. It always adds something. Even the look of the writer’s penmanship adds a tinge of something to the image. Verbal material in art photography is not unheard of, but not on the back. Well, actually an art photo might have something on the back, also in the spirit of annotation of some sort: technical information, for example. But it’s not intended for us, we don’t ordinarily see it, and it’s not part of our experience of the photo on the other side. Sometimes flat art objects have two “working” sides—I am thinking of drawings or paintings with studies on the back, or cases where materials were reused for whatever reason. But the two works are two works. Supposing we are allowed to see the two sides of a sheet or a canvas, it’s certainly not impossible for them to seem to add up in some sense, but what is “not impossible” for a graphic art object is simply the way snapshots are. Inscription and image are integral in snapshots. The back and the front are part of something greater than either. What they add up to is not necessarily terribly interesting. But as we know, a snapshot that really comes together for us in any way is a rarity. What I want to say is that the two-sidedness of snapshots is a natural part of their formal vocabulary from our point of view. And that’s because a snapshot is an object. Snapshots were originally perceived as objects by the snapshooters: there was no reason not to write on the back if there was something to say. Since a snapshot was a memorialization of something rather than a work to be displayed, pertinent verbal information was just part of it. And we sense that (though for us, who do sometimes display snapshots, a two-sided object can be unwieldy). The back of the photo may or may not be one of the factors that interest us as snapshot appreciators, needless to say, just as we may or may not care about color. But it is there for us to care about. The back of an art photo is not there for us (as viewers) to care about. So when we, as snapshot appreciators, take advantage of what we find written on the back of a snapshot, we are taking advantage of a possibility inherent in snapshots and snapshots only, the same one the snapshooters themselves exploited—which they did because of the way snapshots worked for them in their lives. A final idea: It might be thought that our formal appreciation of snapshots ignores their function. Are we aestheticizing them to the exclusion of the meaning and the use they had in real life? Little of that comes down to us, of course. I’ve suggested that mystery helps a photo. But we don’t discard any information, and knowledge can also help, as in this example. We use what we have. I’m not interested in “theory”; as far as the actual evidence goes, a snapshot is in fact mostly just something to look at. That is what we have! But the better response is that snapshot form follows snapshot function: the back is there as an aesthetic variable because it was important to the snapshooters. I’ve said over and over that snapshots aren’t art photos; we can’t make them into art photos. When we appreciate snapshots fairly as the kinds of formal objects they actually are, we are necessarily respecting their original function—which is as much as we can do, because it could never be their function for us.

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