The politics of snapshots, Part II

When we look at snapshots, we look at them with a photographic eye that has seen more than just snapshots. How could we not? When (for example) we are struck by the presence or absence of pictorial unity in a snapshot, we are importing standards from elsewhere. If we collect snapshots, we may have more stringent standards still. At some level, most snapshot collectors are actually comparing found photos to art photography. Is there something wrong with that? First, are snapshots really the people’s photography? One thing we can’t say is that snapshots stand to art photography as folk art does to art. I guess it was once a provocation to claim (correctly) that the official art in our museums is just our own folk art, that a Martian anthropologist would not privilege it the way we do. But folk art is art, made by artists. As we know, snapshot photography may use the same technology as art photography, but it isn’t art, even under a strained definition, and it isn’t made by artists. It has a different purpose entirely—mostly, still, the same kind of purpose urged by Kodak in 1888—and retains it across all social classes. It’s telling that even art photographers take ordinary snapshots of their families, whereas nobody works both as a folk artist and as a mainstream artist; it’s significant too that there are crossover painters like Henri Rousseau, whereas it’s hard to imagine a bona fide snapshooter gradually becoming or being accepted as a bona fide art photographer. So although there is a distance from which “our” art, the art that we tend to have in mind when we use the word art, would come into focus as just one folk art among many, there is no distance from which art photography would seem to be one snapshot photography among many. Snapshot photography is functionally its own category and can begin to speak to art photography only when it is used as art in some fashion—as it is by snapshot collectors. It may or may not be inflammatory in that role—a full century after Duchamp, I really think that’s all over—but otherwise I don’t see how it can be; we might as well expect shopping lists or other popular uses of the written word to pose a grave threat to the literary canon. Snapshot photography represents a democratization of photography, but absolutely not a democratization of art photography. It was a different animal from the start and remains one today. It is so different from art photography that when snapshot collectors compare the two, as we do, it is an exercise of wit, much like Duchamp’s comparison (in Bottle Rack) of anonymous industrial design and sculpture. Thomas Walther built for himself a collection of Modernist masterpieces, the all-important added joke being that every one of them is accidental and that he himself is the de facto artist. The historical comparison is being drawn deliberately by Walther himself, which means the disparaging word “pseudomorphism” isn’t appropriate; I don’t think Duchamp did anything wrong in comparing a bottle rack to sculpture. You could also see Walther’s found Modernism as an extended allusion. Just as I can allude to a painter like Magritte in a found photo if I feel like it, I can also find allusions to specific photographs, to photographic movements, and to art photography itself. For someone who actually wants to enjoy looking at pictures—as opposed to thinking about them, in your academic sort of way—there’s precious little of interest in snapshots. What statistically rare enjoyment they do provide will come from treating them as found objects: from somehow pulling them out of context. The further question is what kind of photographic standards to use when we do that. Snapshots, when they become found photos, are accidentally occurring images that fit with our tastes, so I think some sort of implied comparison is inevitable. In particular, an art-oriented person will see art photography in snapshots (or fail to see it: the fun may sometimes be that snapshots don’t come off well in the comparison). Thomas Walther’s idea was that his eye for regular art photography could be applied directly to snapshots. But there are other ways of going about things. Snapshots are an essentially limitless repository of imagery, which means that, in principle, they are susceptible to being used as an absolutely new photographic language. So my view is that the collector’s job is to find ways to stretch or reformulate the inescapable analogy with art photography—to think of snapshots differently in relation to the photos that we already know. Perhaps the most important point to be made against the charge that found photos are imitations of art photography is that they aren’t. To compare snapshots to art photography is not to equate snapshots with art photography: snapshots that become found photos in someone’s collection, even Thomas Walther’s, are still, in every way, snapshots. I’ve been at pains here (especially in the first large division of this blog) to point out the many respects in which snapshots must be snapshots to do what they do for us—their objectiness, their age, their “innocence,” their mystery, and so forth. We are aware of all of this when we look at them. It is part of our experience of them and we actually love it. We aren’t missing anything, but the view that snapshots shouldn’t be compared with art photography—in essence, that we aren’t allowed to enjoy looking at them—misses all the fun.

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