Tricks

Snapshot collectors are keeping something from themselves. For whatever reason—perhaps because the rumors of the “death of the subject” have crippled us—we find it useful to pretend that all we’re doing is recognizing somebody else’s nice pictures. But in fact choosing snapshots is so personal that it’s effectively a way of rummaging around in our own brains: I see no escape from that conclusion, as long as we are choosing non-randomly. No, of course there isn’t necessarily a whole lot of expressive oomph behind what we do—it depends on the collector—but that’s true for straight photography too, and in the end a snapshot collector and a straight photographer are doing the same kind of thing. Choosing a picture is like taking a picture. We don’t have to really be conscious of that at every moment; for me, at least, it’s a troublesome truth that I can put to one side when I need to. Life is easier that way. A psychological trick like this would not be possible without a category containing a vast number of very different, potentially expressive objects that (unlike nice rocks picked up on the beach, say) actually were made by someone else in a superficial sense, so that we can be quasi-objective about them and partly unaware of their personal value for us, at least sometimes. The category of snapshots fills that bill, and I am lucky to have happened on it. Having realized that snapshots are expressive (a word that I understand very broadly), having realized that we, the collectors, are making them do some kind of personal work for us, in however weak and sloppy a way, it seems to me that we can’t go back. Now we have to do what we can to clarify things (while not spoiling the trick, if possible). If choosing a picture is like taking a picture, I think snapshots are daring us to try to make choosing a picture be as meaningful (in its own way) as taking a picture can be. I at least feel I must claim snapshots as completely mine and be up-front about it—and make them do all they are capable of doing for me, which I am convinced is a great deal. And why wouldn’t I? Unfortunately, the trick we play on ourselves as a matter of psychological utility has fooled the public too. In the era of “vernacular photography,” and I am not going to write that phrase without quotation marks, it seems all too easy to believe that found photos have nothing to do with the finder. On the other hand, the first found photos were seen correctly as exactly that, found photos, with all that was implied by the deliberate echo of Duchamp; “vernacular photography” is the revisionist interpretation. So maybe what we find all too easy to believe about found photos is more a matter of fashion, of art-world cycles. People who don’t understand found photos can see them as a different kind of trick: as an art gimmick aimed at the public, one contrived to make a point beyond the pictures themselves. Possibly this view—exemplified in some of the response to Tacita Dean’s Floh, and arguably in the work itself—has become less common now that found photography (or “vernacular photography”) has established itself as a genre to some degree. In any case there is no such point, and I don’t like art that makes points. The pictures are all there is. They have, as a class, their own properties, which I like for their own sake. Snapshots do something for me that no other kind of photo could, and collecting snapshots does something for me that collecting no other kind of photo could. If I collected other kinds of photos, I couldn’t be anything more than a curator. Snapshots are so unique as a class that collecting them even does something for me that nothing else could. The public doesn’t enter into it. A primitive attraction to a photo comes first, but higher faculties, less and less fooled by the trick I play on myself, sharpen what I do. They can organize and arrange, they are capable of being critical, and they can also be bored or embarrassed; they refine and shape my collection and in many cases overrule the lower faculties that don’t know how to do anything but like and choose. The process can be seen in action in pictures which, at the stupidest level, I still like, but which I have decided against or am in the process of deciding against. In this example the “higher faculties” have come to the conclusion that dummies and masks are too trite to tolerate, though you may feel this picture has other things going for it. For pictures that pass all the tests, a final step is to assemble them into larger units. That would help them, wouldn’t it?

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