What is good?

I’ve heard it said that we all know what a good snapshot is. To me this is like saying we all know what a good photo is, or what “good” is. How could we? A reasonable emendation might be: An all-knowing being would know what most people in a given community consider a good snapshot at any given moment. Taste in snapshots is very much a contingent thing, formed to a large extent by a few tastemakers—that is, strong collectors. And it is a constantly evolving thing. Our snapshot community, which is not the same as the Hungarian snapshot community, is in all respects like any creative community: a mutating mess of fad, influence, arbitrariness, and innovation, all tied obscurely to the outer world. I can only assume that a strong collector of the future will turn things on their heads and force us to notice what we haven’t noticed. The snapshot pool is big, and impossibly various: it would be a kind of arrogance to think that what our taste has happened to select from it here and now is something other than just that. But any visual style makes itself understood by dint of repetition, elaboration, context. Any one picture will not seem deliberate. Just as every collection is a product of a community of collections and can be evaluated only in the context of that community, every snapshot in every collection is only an example and will not make sense except in the context of the rest. The more unusual the collection, the truer this is.

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