The limits of accident? Part II

The accidents that happened to a snapshot during its lifetime are one thing. The accidents that changed its social environment so that people saw it differently are another. And the accidents that made it look like art to someone are yet another. The first kind of accident is unique to snapshots (among photographs), for reasons I’ve mentioned: snapshots were taken casually, they were poorly controlled at all technical stages, and they tended to get knocked around. The second kind of accident, in which the picture holds still but the world changes around it so as to create distance or irony in the minds of later viewers, goes far beyond photography, art, or man-made objects (it would apply to all cultural products, including ideas). The third, all-important kind of accident is just part of foundness, and that is why I have waited this long to introduce it. In the preceding section I gave a few examples of accidents that happened somewhere between the moment a snapshot was taken and the moment it met our eye. But I would defy you to put your finger on an accident in this photo. It’s a beautiful picture, I love it, and I have very definitely “found” it. But I think it’s hopeless to try to say the person who took it was not trying to get precisely this shot or was somehow less aware than we are of something in the scene. “I found it”: the way I love it is my own. I have reinterpreted it, and not because the mood struck me—it happened to look like art to me, and I can’t help that. In this and all found photos, a subtle kind of accident occurred, one conditioned by all the other accidents that may or may not have happened to them. Like Bottle Rack, they had the Duchampian good fortune to come in handy aesthetically to someone who ran across them. All found photos have a statistically unlikely aesthetic shimmer to their finders that they didn’t have to their makers—and so to that extent all found photos are accidental. Back to Bottle Rack for a second. As a piece of industrial design, that porte-bouteilles surely represented precisely what was intended. We can also assume that nothing happened to it before Duchamp saw it. So it didn’t suffer any accidents corresponding to those that so often occur during the lifetime of a snapshot. But by sheer chance its purely functional conformation, the history of art to that point, and Duchamp’s own constitution as an artist all came together in such a way that, of the many, many objects in that hardware store, this one reminded Duchamp of sculpture. Out of many, many snapshots that didn’t remind me of anything, this snapshot reminded me of a different kind of photo. Just as Bottle Rack was a one-in-a-million object, few snapshots get to be found photos, as I use those terms: not many photos taken by snapshot cameras have the good fortune to suit an aesthetically-minded finder. Even if they manage to escape their original context and then get seen by the right kind of eye, they’re almost always far too boring to look twice at. But once in a while a snapshot becomes a found photo: fate intervenes, not simply to make the photo the image-object that it is, not simply to give us something interesting to look at, but to enable it to have some aesthetic appeal in our context. We “find” it because it is lucky enough to make sense there. A found photo looks—accidentally—like some idea of art. But isn’t that silly? Why go around looking for accidental resemblances? Isn’t that like seriously hoping for literature from monkeys at keyboards? Unlike anything a monkey might produce, a photo really is about what it’s about, of course. It documents a real event. And the odds of finding something valuable are better than infinitesimal. But the truth is that found photos can be silly. For example, many snapshots could almost have been taken by Diane Arbus if Arbus had taken snapshots, precisely because Arbus learned from the snapshot look. It would be possible to “find” them for that reason, either in naïve imitation or as a contemporary ironic joke. I think both projects would be pretty dreary, but that’s just my opinion; snapshots are capacious enough to accommodate them. I can also use snapshots in the service of my own photographic ideas, supposing I have any. Snapshots are a fertile source of ideas, fertile enough that we can find something in them that’s really ours, and keep finding it. I’ve pointed out that, since snapshots contain practically everything, Duchampian accident—the accident that satisfies the eye of the finder—is necessarily individual. But I don’t believe I have quite driven this idea home: it can also, in principle, be entirely new.

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