The politics of snapshots, Part I: “pseudomorphism”

This wonderful art-historical jargon word, which goes back to Erwin Panofsky, is still used to refer to accidental and meaningless formal resemblances in art. For example, some of the Gee’s Bend quilts may bring to mind Piet Mondrian or Robert Rauschenberg or Ad Reinhardt. Such similarities would be “pseudomorphic” if we believe, as we probably must, that the quilters shared no pedigree with mainstream artists like these and weren’t influenced by them (or the movements they were part of) in any way. I’ve seen the word applied, with disapproval, to found photos. For instance, the prevailing look of Thomas Walther’s Other Pictures—a massively influential snapshot show that ran at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000—is a sort of “found Modernism”: the pictures often suggest some of the photographic Modernists, especially European ones like André Kertész or Bill Brandt (to the right is my own version of the same look). The idea would be that it’s silly of Thomas Walther to see anything in these accidental resemblances. The same idea would generalize to cover any snapshot collector’s quest for echoes of this or that stripe of art photography, and it would generalize to cover the mere presence, in any form, of art photography as a point of reference in found photos. It’s an idea that may (and should) be lurking in your mind as a sort of worry. But the charge of pseudomorphism is not made by people hostile to snapshots—far from it. I am thinking of academic writers on photography, the French-flavored ones who found their voices a generation ago and tend (I believe) to be ultimately soixante-huitards in broad outlook. Often these commentators seem to be motivated by an understandable political irritation with the art establishment. And snapshots look like a handy Molotov cocktail. I hope it is not too grotesque a parody to say that this kind of writer views snapshot photography as analogous to a vast oppressed underclass and canonical art photography as analogous to a privileged elite. The project would be to bring snapshot photography out of the shadows and give it its rightful place at the table; to knock canonical art photography off its pedestal and relativize it so that it is only one photography of many. People who think this way tend to distrust canons, masterpieces, “geniuses,” greatness, and originality, to oppose a view of art history as a respectable progression of isms and influences, and to be uninterested in formal analysis (or enjoyment) of isolated works. They prefer to think about how art and artists are produced socially and how they function in the world. From a perspective like this, what snapshot collectors do (at least the aesthetically-minded ones) is perfectly trivial, because it ignores the social context of the form in favor of accidentally pretty pictures, which are pretty merely by direct “pseudomorphism” with the prettiness of the old order. Collectors, in this view, are thinking not about snapshots as they need to be understood, but about Modernism or art photography as we already know them. A snapshot collector (say Thomas Walther) is nothing but your old-fashioned “original” or derivative artist by other means and in the cause of being one has unfairly assimilated snapshots to art photography. And it follows that the only way a collection (or book or show) could really do justice to snapshots without allowing the traditional artist in through the back door would be to select them randomly. The thinking is much like that of the Marxist critics who used to feel that formalist art (or the formalist attitude) was blinkered, even immoral, because it was apolitical, with the additional belief that snapshots actually are (not just can or should be) a powerful politico-artistic stick in the eye. Now, I don’t object to the idea that you could (in John Heartfield’s words) “use photography as a weapon”—in fact I’ve often wanted such a weapon—but unfortunately I can’t see how snapshots make art photography in any way vulnerable. To be continued in the next post.

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