The power of many

Snapshots inevitably lose context—information and meaning—in the transition between family album and snapshot collection. One consequence is that they lend themselves to a sort of abstraction. My family dog as I know her in the snapshots taken in my childhood would be the Family Dog to you if one of them became your found photo. What was once a specific somebody in a snapshot becomes an iconic Somebody in a found photo. The way to bring out this generality, which might otherwise go unnoticed, is to put a lot of similar examples side by side. What they all have in common also highlights what they don’t: having seen the theme, we now notice the variations. The one-in-many, many-in-one effect of this kind of grouping is reminiscent of the inventories assembled by taxonomist-photographers like August Sander or Bernd and Hilla Becher. But snapshots give us something more, precisely because of what they don’t give us. As I say, snapshots encourage us to universalize for their own reason: they’re someone else’s family photos, not ours, and we don’t have the memories and associations that would complete them as meaning-bearing objects. For us these people never were very specific. Unlike an August Sander portrait, or even a photo of an anonymous person taken by a street photographer, a found photo has actually been stripped of meaning it once had. And as we begin to wonder, as we can’t help trying to answer questions and fill in details, we are perfectly aware that we can only fail. So I believe constructing a sequence like this out of snapshots gives it a feeling straight photography can’t approach. When we contemplate the blankness of all these back stories, I think we realize in some way that “generality” was purchased at the price of the complete and permanent loss of information and personal value—that is, at the price of destruction and death.