Uniqueness and responsibility

When works of art—images fashioned by someone—could be reproduced, people began to care less about the originals, even about originals in general; the part of an original work that got copied in a copy often seemed to be enough. What Walter Benjamin in 1936 called the “aura” of an original art object—a sense of traditional meaning and purpose surrounding a unique work—became increasingly irrelevant, especially in the case of popular forms that depended on reproduction. Photography is one of Benjamin’s prime examples of the new art: inherently reproducible, potentially aimed at a popular audience, “aura”-less. For all practical purposes a journalistic photo or a movie doesn’t even have an original, and no one misses it. Art photos may exist (at least in part) in the form of “original prints”—copies made from the negative by the photographer for display and sale—but we still don’t think of an original print of an art photo as the “real” photo the way we think of the original of a painting that we may have seen in reproduction as the “real” work of art. An original print loses a lot less in reproduction than a painting does, and an original print needn’t be unique to begin with. There’s no original art photo with any of the in-the-flesh mystique of a great painting of comparable age. In fact the iconic photographic images that come to mind mostly seem to exist in the abstract, untethered to any particular physical instance. Snapshot photography is photography, and it’s as popular as photography can get—yet snapshots are unique, traditionally meaningful objects, crawling with Benjaminian aura. I believe even the sole existing print of an art photo could not have the auratic weight of an ordinary snapshot; so the fact that a snapshot probably exists in one copy is not the whole story. I’ve pointed out that snapshots, unlike most photographs, are strongly felt to be objects, and that certainly accounts for some of their perceived individuality. They are of course unmistakably distinct and distinctive objects when they are worn or damaged or when their surface has been deliberately altered in some way. Original prints of art photos would be unique in this sense too if they were allowed to live a little—to age distinctively—or if photographers made a practice of producing versions of their work. But a snapshot is also functionally unique: it does something only it could do, and here is where its existence in one copy matters. Many families possess snapshots that are the only existing views of long-dead ancestors. In fact you’d have to say that every snapshot is a unique view of someone or something, a unique window onto some moment that, if not for the snapshot itself, would be gone forever as soon as everyone who remembered it was dead. A snapshot is so palpably unique as a document that it is often felt to be precious—the only link to a lost personal or family (“traditional”) past. Snapshots are a throwback to pre-Benjaminian time because, even though they are produced by means of a popular technology, they are not distributed through that technology: they make sense within small, closed communities, for which they retain what Benjamin referred to as “ritual value” in evoking a loved one or past time. Snapshot photography is a modern, popular technology, but a snapshot of a long-gone relative is functionally about the same as a painting of a long-gone relative; this use of photography is the successor to that use of painting. The snapshot example shows us that Benjamin was partly wrong—the loss of “aura” has to do not with the new technologies in and of themselves, but with the way the new technologies are used. Snapshots are photography, but they’re not media. I’ve been talking about snapshots as snapshots, not as found photos. When a snapshot becomes a found photo, it loses the specificity of its traditional value. We don’t know these people. But it retains the power of its uniqueness. Like a painting whose specific meaning has been lost, a snapshot still has the “aura” of a singular, deeply meaningful object, and so in this respect it goes on being more like a painting than it is like a photo (and of course it picks up some more aura when our “finding” it turns it into a new art object). But it is a photo, and we know it’s the sole photographic witness to what it depicts—so again it is uniquely potent. Imagine your favorite photographic image, encountered not as a reproduction in a book or newspaper but as a one-of-a-kind snapshot at the bottom of a cardboard box in a flea market. Although it might be harder to notice, because no one would be telling you to look at it, its effect would be stronger once you did notice it. As portrayed in a found photo—now your photo and no one else’s—the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner, let’s say, would engage you more personally, would even provoke a stronger political outrage (supposing you were susceptible to such a thing). If you lay claim to it, you lay claim to everything about it. From this perspective a carton of snapshots is a rather alarming responsibility. It’s not just a box of unique images—it’s also a box of unique records of unique events. We can dismiss images without doing moral damage to ourselves, may not be sensitive to them to begin with. But it’s harder to brush off history when we have the only record of it, even if it’s largely a history of family dogs and trips to the Grand Canyon.

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