The look

If an ordinary snapshot is like a casual conversation between the snapshooter and the subject or subjects, a transaction that the participants had every reason to believe would remain private, a found snapshot is like that conversation overheard by someone; and a snapshot in a coherent collection is like a conversation overheard by a writer—a conversation fortunate enough to have caught the attention of someone who can put it to use. Snapshots in a collection are not just themselves. They are material. They were selected by a sensibility, and the more self-conscious the collection is, the more they were selected for a purpose, the purpose of constructing an aesthetic (I hate this noun, but it will have to do). Most kinds of collections aren’t working on a style, or a feeling, or an idea—on anything beyond an accumulation of the objects of interest. They are prevented from doing so by the nature of the objects themselves. A stamp collection is, can only be, about the stamps, and an art collection, even an eccentric one, is about the art objects. The objects in the collection may exemplify a taste, but they still have a context of their own, to which the collection is responsible. A snapshot collection is irresponsible. In order to put snapshots to work the way we do, we rip them out of context. Actually, they come without context—we couldn’t access their original meaning or feel their original value even if we wanted to. And collections of other decontextualized found objects? Take glass insulators, the kind that were once used on above-ground communications and power lines. These are highly collectible, but not for their sculptural diversity. There just isn’t enough variety out there for a collection of glass insulators to be interesting in that way, and yet a wider range of objects would lose formal coherence. It seems to me that snapshots are unique in this respect: they very definitely constitute a formal class, yet their range is so great that a carefully selected subset can seem to have as much personal connection to the collector as a group of art photographs does to the photographer. I have all sorts of found objects, and many are marvelous, but my snapshots, as a body, are by far the most articulate of them. I can make them mine in a way that seems to me unparalleled, not just because they’re up for grabs as found objects are, but because they lend themselves to an organized and textured statement. There are all sorts of ways to build up an aesthetic, again because the snapshot spectrum is so very wide. Most snapshot collections, like the one sampled in this blog, range freely across formats and processes, with the result that the unifying element must be a bit more abstract than it is in the work of a photographer; at any given moment a photographer will generally be getting a consistent technically-based look, but a snapshot collector probably can’t use that device. Nevertheless, there have been a couple of books devoted to Polaroids and Kodachromes. The Kodacolor process is still neglected, though its palette can be very beautiful.

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