The hunt

Collectors know another great picture is out there. We aren’t just hoping—the numbers are with us. But the numbers are also against us. Statistical reality means we need bulk, and we need a constant supply of it: bulk today, bulk tomorrow, and bulk the day after that. Snapshot collectors are like whales straining plankton out of seawater—we have to go through thousands of snapshots every week in order to extract a bit of nourishment. Unlike a stamp collector, say, who is probably mainly interested in completeness, a snapshot collector has a diet. Volume is indispensable for any sort of snapshot collecting, but it is possible to farm some of the work out—to be a white-gloves sort of collector who buys at high levels, after the volume has already been processed by others. I wouldn’t want to be that kind of collector. There is real pleasure in sorting through photos that no one has seen, and in being the first to recognize something extraordinary. Unsorted photos are also a fertile source of ideas, whereas a dealer’s selection represents at best a lot of pre-had ideas that limit the pool and surely limit your imagination. It would certainly be terrible to have to describe what you want to intermediaries, because that would mean you’d have to know before you saw it. Finally, suppose you have a special interest more special than some—a preoccupation too peculiar or difficult to explain for anyone to have spotted it as “a thing” or to cater to it. In such a case you simply have to do the work yourself. Securing the daily quotient takes constant work. We can never have enough. Since the goal is not just to possess but to be surprised, enlarged, nourished, asking a collector to be happy with some number of snapshots is like asking a painter to quit at some number of paintings. Collecting snapshots is unlike painting in that it is not a solitary affair. We can’t stay at home: the primary work of it (at least the time-consuming part that must precede anything else) involves aggressively scraping things out of the environment. We are constantly spending money and jostling with our competitors—other collectors with whom we may share an ecological niche and who may have more to spend. We are very much at the mercy of the marketplace if we want to continue to make progress with our collections, and not everyone is cut out for continuous acquisitive aggression. And since snapshots make the most sense when placed in some kind of context, meaning that ultimately they’re just material, it’s as if a writer had to keep laying out money and scuffling just to get words to work with. I am not happy with this aspect of snapshot collecting considered as an art-like activity.

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