The family

The very first Kodak ads made the bare-bones point that snapshot cameras were simple and easy to use. Next came ads featuring women and children (“Let the children Kodak”), the part of the consumership that would presumably care most about simplicity and ease of use; men barely figured at all. By 1910, the family was explicitly appearing in the advertising. “Make Kodak your family historian,” the copy urged. The family (or the couple) was the natural audience for snapshot cameras, and it was their natural subject. The snapshot camera was a small appliance that fit into “the home” but could travel, like an alarm clock, say; and it served the inhabitants of the home, the family, in a similar way. Kodak tried to get people to take cameras everywhere, but it couldn’t have imagined a world like ours, in which we actually do. Today, when everyone who carries a phone is also carrying a camera, the camera is a fully personal device, less like a clock and more like a watch. It is less anchored in the home and thus its natural subject is less centered around the family. The family is the core subject of snapshots, and, certainly as represented in snapshots, it’s a banal one. For the most part snapshots are a bottomless pile of babies, birthdays, and beaches. But that doesn’t really matter to snapshot collectors, because they aren’t primarily interested in the subject. They are interested in the formal features of snapshot photography. To the snapshooters, of course, “banality” would have been an intrusion from another frame of reference. I don’t want to hear a gourmet’s opinion of my breakfast, and the snapshooters wouldn’t have cared to have aesthetic terms applied to their family photographs. The family is a banal subject, but it is also a sensational subject, because the family is a private realm. In the hands of an art photographer like Nicholas Nixon, the family does not seem sensational; Nixon is our friendly guide to his family. He is showing it to us and seems sane, so it must be all right for us to see it. But popular morality is sometimes offended by someone like Sally Mann, who deliberately gets our goat by going where perhaps even a parent shouldn’t go and daring to broadcast what she finds there. Snapshot collectors confront a similar taboo: we see what no one said we could see and show what no one said we could show. When we appropriate people’s family photos, we are doing something not too far from rummaging through their trash or reading their mail, or so it might be felt. I suppose every serious snapshot collector has met someone who believes we are crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed—who thinks family memorabilia are sacrosanct and should not be poked into even after the families themselves are gone. It’s impossible to know how widespread that feeling is and thus how damaging it is to a broader acceptance of snapshot photography. Is the natural barrier around the nuclear family also a barrier to a recognition of what we do? Of course, you could also look at snapshot photography as a window onto an otherwise invisible aspect of life—as indispensable evidence of a side of things we know is universal yet have never really seen beyond our own experience. In particular, it’s very hard to get a first-hand angle on family life in other times and places. Aren’t snapshots valuable from this point of view? Perhaps our awareness that our own family is the only one we’ve ever had a chance to truly know is just what makes some of us feel families should be opaque. Normally our knowledge of what goes on inside family units is like our knowledge of what goes on in bathrooms—extraordinarily vivid as brought to us by our own senses in our own personal environments, but very vague otherwise. Is the family really so private that looking at other people’s family photos must always be like peeking through a keyhole? Evidently it’s a bit touchy, but I’m one of those for whom the pictures themselves outweigh everything. There is just nothing like these images, and the thrill of the forbidden might even be a good counterbalance to the banality of the family as a subject.

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