The limits of accident? Part I

The snapshooters were interested in the subject, but we are interested in the total image, the picture. This formula, though we might want to hedge it just a touch, seems to capture a lot of what snapshots are about. We are so interested in the image that we pretty much don’t care how it came to be—the snapshooters didn’t necessarily have much to do with it. But we want to be the one to recognize it. That is: we like it that (as we assume) the snapshooters weren’t interested in the image the way we are, because that lets us be first. Originality of recognition is the essence of foundness. We want to be the lucky and perceptive person who pulls the snapshot into the new context and makes it a found photo. Even if we aren’t, even if the picture was “found” before we owned it, we like to believe that we have discovered something in it that’s all ours. “We don’t care how it came to be.” What that means is that found photos are something of a portmanteau category. As we know, the image can “come to be” through any number of different kinds of freak accidents or failures to be ordinary, which the snapshooters may or may not have been or have ever become aware of but whose value or point of interest they probably were not. For example, they saw a double exposure but didn’t appreciate it the way we do; they didn’t see an irony and also didn’t appreciate it the way we do. Subtly or crudely, we are always taking advantage of (what we feel to be) some difference in awareness between the snapshooters and ourselves. Earlier (“Formal accident: pictorial happenstance,” “Formal accident: technical flaws,” “Formal accident: wear and damage”) I mentioned some of the ways accident can affect, can form a snapshot as an image-bearing object. One snapshot out of many thousands will have scars good enough to make it a found photo. The first example is a classical technical accident. I have no idea what it was, but we know as well as we know anything about snapshots that it was undesired and unwelcome and that the emotional value of the image for us is completely fortuitous, a fabrication of fate. The second example is an accidental shot in a number of more subtle ways. The ambiguity of the writhing figure—agony or ecstasy?—the conjunction of figure and verbal material, the content of that verbal material, even its inclusion at all, are very likely all inadvertent. Again, we have to doubt that the snapshooter ever perceived the effect, ever saw the photo the way we see it. In the third example, we can see accident hovering somewhere above the picture, so to speak—in the way things have changed between its time and ours. If societies never changed, if styles and manners and our feelings about them were the same from one decade to the next and an advance in photographic technology was the only thing separating this past and our present, the gap in sensibilities that we are so aware of in this picture would not exist and there would be much less to see in it. What we feel when we contemplate that gap edges into irony, which, inevitable or not in cases like this, can be cruel. The photo looks deliberate, although its perfection is probably a statistical fluke: we are not looking at an unintended image. But no one involved with the picture, snapshooter or subjects, could ever have guessed that we in the future would think it was funny. The last case is a bit troubling. Whenever a found photo—a snapshot that has attracted someone’s attention for aesthetic reasons—doesn’t seem to have been formed by an overt accident, must it always exhibit something approaching historical irony? I sense a certain strain in the “accident” idea, which is foundational for many snapshot collectors. Are all snapshots really accidental? More in the next section.

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