Wrap-up of pluses and minuses

Snapshots don’t seem to have a lot going for them as photos. They’re so small that they give the senses only so much to work with, like music that can’t be turned up. They weren’t made by real photographers, ones who possessed professional virtues of any kind; often they were made by people who obviously weren’t even really paying attention, and they can be beyond sloppy. At any given stage in the development of photographic technology, the technical values of snapshots are at the low end of the available scale. Their subjects tend to be banal. For the most part they just don’t look like much. As art, snapshots are even less promising. There are no demonstrable snapshot artists. Even if we accept that and go out consciously looking for snapshots that “no one took,” ones worth a second glance are so rare that to a first approximation they don’t exist. Nine hundred ninety-nine out of a thousand will be interchangeable family scenes of no conceivable aesthetic interest. Though it might appeal to someone, that one in a thousand still probably won’t appeal to any given searcher who happens to see it. But mathematics, together with that basic sloppiness, also works in our favor. There are so many snapshots, and they contain so much accidental variation, that a sufficiently large random sample of them will contain pretty much anything; this is the “law of truly large numbers,” which statisticians use to explain why amazing things are bound to happen. Given enough opportunities, even a vanishingly unlikely event will occur sooner or later, and chance is guaranteed to deliver something amazing into the hands of anyone who looks at enough snapshots. One in a thousand, enough thousands of times, can’t fail. As long as we keep looking at them, snapshots will keep surprising us. And if we are looking for beauty, something matching our notion of what that is will turn up eventually. Persistent low standards and extremely large numbers: these two factors, both unique to snapshots, constitute the mechanism that gives us what we’re looking for. Without low standards, accidents would not occur and snapshots would all be boring; without large numbers, favorable accidents would not occur often enough. The likelihood of unlikelihood, the certainty that a marvel by my standards will come along sooner or later, so far outweighs the technical inadequacies of the medium and its practitioners that I don’t think I have ever worried about them; mostly they are just part of the “look” that came into being the moment anyone tried to think of snapshots in aesthetic terms. And, as I’ve said, minuses can even be pluses: the same inadequacies can help create that salutary lack of uniformity that we depend on.

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