Vagueness

Snapshots were usually taken for a clear and simple purpose—to get a rough-and-ready record of the subject. That purpose is so much what we expect to see in a snapshot that the exceptions stand out. Earlier (here and here) I mentioned that very snapshotty class of snapshots whose purpose is fundamentally and permanently mysterious. To me an apparently purposeless picture is exciting: what other kind of photo could be so completely mysterious that its entire reason for being is a mystery? And yet at the same time a snapshot is as straightforward with us as a photo can be. Another small corner of snapshot space is occupied by pictures that may or may not have an evident purpose but are vague in photographic terms—pictures that, one way or another, didn’t come together pictorially and whose emotional value is uncertain, to me wonderfully so. (The word “off” might also describe them.) Photos like this are accidents, of course. They fail to have things that photos are supposed to have. Snapshots are often missing important things, but many kinds of snapshot deficiencies have been noticed and found interesting by art photographers and eventually assimilated into the photography mainstream, so that they are now felt as style or even as nothing. Slapdash snapshot composition, for example, which at one time must have seemed to lack rigor, is now so normal that it may not even register as much of a stylistic choice when we see it in art photography or in media. But what I am calling vagueness is not like snapshot composition in this respect. It still seems like a failure. One thing I enjoy in found photos, possibly the thing I enjoy most, is found feeling: feeling created, not as the result of something in the snapshooter’s mind, but by chance events in the life a photo as they affect my own mind. In the case of a “vague” snapshot, those events messed up the job. So the picture is not only about the result of chance events, it is effectively about those chance events themselves, since we are forced to think critically about where they went wrong. It is about what creates or fails to create a snapshot that becomes a findable found photo, the best kind of findable found photo. Unlike a purposeless art photo, a vague art photo is at least possible, it seems to me. We can imagine a William Klein or a Mark Cohen, a photographer who exploits chance, poking around in the roots of his art and getting interested in cases in which chance almost did what he wanted, but not quite. But he wouldn’t have much reason to show us a bad picture unless he also thought it was in some way good, and that is harder to imagine. Vague photos are bad photos of a kind, a category of bad within the great mass of snapshot bad. They are snapshotty: created as a natural part of the snapshot process, which encourages badness. There are many more such categories. I am sure that most of them are still undiscovered.

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