Truth and mystery

We don’t doubt a snapshot. A snapshot tells us how it was. We don’t doubt a snapshot because we understand the spirit in which it was taken. We understand that it was taken with no thought to an audience—a consumership—even if the shot was in some sense an experiment. More than any other kind of photo, a snapshot is something we feel we must trust: it lacks the extra layer of fishy complication that intrudes itself when a photo (or anything else) is made to be put before the public. Within its technical limits, a snapshot shows us something that actually happened, not someone’s selective and considered version of what happened. It wasn’t intended for the ages, but it wasn’t tailored for them either. A snapshot is nearly as true in this sense as a surveillance video, and it exhibits the same tradeoff between truth and technical adequacy. The obvious fact that its technical values are just barely up to the job is of course part of what tips us off that it is true, that we can trust it. But if, having invested all that trust, we encounter something mysterious in a snapshot, now we have to take it seriously as a true mystery. It’s not just mystification. No one concocted it, no one was interested in mood or effect; the picture is just a record. A snapshot tells us how it was, but—what was that, exactly? You may say that this kind of mystery is not the pleasurable mystery of art, but the aesthetically neutral mystery of history, science, or crime—not atmosphere, but simply the absence of complete information. The itch for the full story would indeed be out of place, but we have no such itch; we are luxuriating in speculation. A snapshot mystery is a mystery that can never be solved, that we know can never be solved. But it is very much stronger, realer, than the make-believe mystery of a Gregory Crewdson, say, which can only evoke a make-believe bafflement. The irony is that an avowed work of imagination like one of Crewdson’s imprisons the speculative faculty in pointless thoughts about the artist’s intention, whereas the businesslike snapshot sets the imagination free. This effect is unique to snapshots, I believe. Nothing else has such an utterly documentary spirit so sloppily expressed. Unlike the cooked-up mysteries of art, snapshot mysteries are real mysteries. There is no cuteness in snapshots, no deliberate obscurity; no unanswerable questions are being posed, because no questions are being posed at all. If there are questions in our minds nonetheless, it’s not because we’re wondering about something an artist wants us to wonder about. We’re curious about something that actually happened. This paradoxical collision of very mysterious mystery and very factual facts is something I like a great deal in snapshots.

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