The politics of snapshots, Part III

Snapshots were confoundingly novel photographs when they first appeared, and nearly a century and a half later we are still struggling to see them clearly. Collectors have their own way of getting to the heart of snapshots, and that is to aestheticize them: we choose a few that speak to us as photos, and (at least ideally) put them to work in personal projects. It’s an old-time art, if you like; it makes sense within a tradition, the Duchampian one. Just as Bottle Rack also made sense within the tradition of sculpture to that point, found photos also make sense within the tradition of art photography as everyone understands it today. Nevertheless, since snapshots are a special kind of photography, the materials of found photography constitute a brand-new opportunity, which collectors want to exploit. For example, the objectiness of snapshots, along with all the potent density that an old object and in particular a physically old photo can possess, is a fresh tool, one that art photography as we know it just doesn’t have and can’t wield. Those who think of snapshots as a kind of folk photography refuse to aestheticize them. It sounds good: Just leave snapshots be. Quit playing favorites, stop twisting them to your own aesthetic purposes. Where do you come in, anyway? Don’t snapshots have enough going for them on their own? The trouble, once again, is that ordinary snapshots actually don’t have much going for them on their own. For the most part they are devoid of what we think of as visual interest, never having been intended to have any. Even a snapshot that might be said to “show” something important about the category, such as a banged-up or defaced example that illustrates snapshot objectiness, will not show it effectively unless the example truly stands out as a photo—unless it has an independent visual strength. That rare strength will have been acquired accidentally, and the accident will be what the collector seizes on. Then the example has to be presented in a way that favors it. Just as it is, the great snapshot corpus doesn’t show anything, and a random sampling of it won’t show anything either. The corpus is, in a word, dilute. It is very dilute, as curators who don’t actually go wading through some of it every day may not be profoundly aware. But collectors try to concentrate it. The inherent characteristics of snapshots, such as objectiness, are what drew us to snapshots in the first place, and so of course we’ll want to highlight them in our own fashion. I’ve been assembling some old points in order to lead up to some new ones. It’s paradoxical, in a way, but the upshot is that if you (consciously or not) consider snapshots to be examples of a folk photography that you want to respectfully show off in its folky, unvarnished state, you won’t be showing it off. You’ll be selling it short. Whereas if you understand that potent snapshot images are statistical anomalies, you can make use of the ones that interest you to present the genre to its advantage. What I’ve been calling folk photography is, of course, none other than the “vernacular photography” that’s now everywhere in our museums under that name. No number of characterless and unlovable photos grouped into unilluminating subject categories will help the genre at all. So the idea that snapshots are the art of the people who took them is not just wrongheaded. It has the practical museological consequence that the value of the pictures goes unseen.

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