Tolerance

Snapshot cameras were hard to control, but that didn’t bother the snapshooters too much. Inexactitude may be all right when exactitude is not part of the goal; and the snapshooters did have goals different from ours, ones that were limited and easily met. I think of crude and indifferently wielded snapshot technology as the engine of snapshot variation—the source of most of what I like. Some of what the snapshooters produced by accident with their cameras must have been too much even for them to accept; they must have filtered out some of that variation. But a lot got through. Because the snapshooters were looking at the subject and not primarily at the image, a snapshot could be pretty rough and still do the job. That is: the tolerance of the snapshooters was so great that it constituted only a weak filter on snapshot variation. In this example the snapshooter or the subject liked the picture well enough to have it printed on postcard stock and write the subject’s name on the back without further comment, even though someone else got into the shot and seems none too happy about it. The mechanism I am picturing—unchecked variation followed by weak filtering—has no counterpart in art photography. There are certainly photographers who court accident. I’d imagine that someone like William Klein, for example—a piece of Robert Frank, with something like Frank’s taste for the random moment but pushed somewhat further—doesn’t know what he’ll get a lot of the time. But of course, as an artist, someone very much interested in an image, he is by nature if not by definition intolerant of all but the little that suits him. So his way of working must include something analogous to snapshot variation, but he sets up a strong filter on it, one corresponding to his eye. Photographers who court accident are very much influenced by snapshot photography. But that doesn’t mean they have the snapshooters’ tolerance. To achieve the effect of snapshot photography and allow useful accidents to happen, Robert Frank took a huge number of pictures. But he tolerated extraordinarily few. Like photographers, snapshot collectors are never tolerant. It’s been calculated that Frank’s shooting ratio was at least 330 to 1; snapshot collectors are far more selective even than that (admittedly your average snapshot would be less interesting than Frank’s throwaways). Roughly speaking, the collector does to the mass of uncollected snapshots what a certain kind of photographer does to his or her own unsorted shots. Once again I am suggesting that the collector is (or can be) equivalent to a photographer, with the wrinkle that the collector doesn’t supply his or her own accidents; they were provided long before by someone else, the snapshooters.

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