The intrusive camera

People in snapshots aren’t necessarily friendly to the camera. They wear expressions of surprise, dismay, anger, embarrassment, they cover their faces or the lens, they make “go away” gestures (or ruder ones), and so on. Such images are essentially missing from documentary art photography. The reason is that documentarists have no interest in challenging reality. They are, precisely, engaged in documenting it—in recording a world that may or may not include themselves but that in any case is not provoked by their presence, at least as far as they allow us to see. Until fairly recently, documentary art photographers would never have conceded their own presence at all. They would have tried to limit what they showed us, what they were officially aware of, to a world that would have been absolutely the same even if they had not been there to record it. Photographers like Lee Friedlander—very much influenced by snapshot photography—put an end to that. Friedlander shows us his image in the world. But he still does not show us conflict between himself and the world. This prohibition has the force of a taboo. Even a radically intrusive photographer like Mark Cohen, who literally shoves his camera in strangers’ faces, does not show us conflict between himself and the world: he denies his own intrusiveness. It’s a taboo that a photographer like Garry Winogrand seems to be itching to break. But the true exceptions actually prove the rule, I believe. For example, Robert Frank’s shot of a hostile African-American couple in a San Francisco park is probably intended to carry a specifically racial meaning. Whatever the truth of that moment may have been, Frank wouldn’t have been interested in showing us people offended merely by his presence as a photographer. The camera is a significant participant in snapshot photography because the people who use snapshot cameras are themselves significant participants in the life being photographed and have no reason to pretend otherwise. We said that snapshot photography is impersonal in some of its aspects, and yet here it is more personal than documentary photography, with its “scientific” remit; documentary photography is made by artists, yet in this sense it is less personal than the snapshots made by non-artists. How can we sort this out? When we call snapshot photography impersonal, we mean that part of its ultimate effect, the part that comes from its formal and technical properties, is to a great extent guided by forces other than the intentions of the people who made them, or perhaps we should say initiated them. Control is poor; the pictures get away from the snapshooters and acquire their own virtues. But when we call it personal, we mean that the initiator is an actor, not a professional observer. The point of view of a snapshot is personal, but the formal character of the picture is not. A documentary photograph is usually the other way around. The example shown here could only be a snapshot, but a “third person” intrusion—a photo of another photographer interfering with life around him or her—would at least not be a contradiction in terms in documentary art photography. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. A view of an unwelcome photographer would still seem to be a comment on the shot itself.

Roll over to enlarge