Youâve got your snapshots, youâve got your found photos, and then youâve got your institutional readings of the genre. Snapshots must pass through the shadowy but extraordinarily cohesive world of snapshot collectors in order to reach the big time and the public eye, but that doesnât mean the snapshot impresarios who present the pictures think the same way about them as the collectors who supply them. Snapshots have in fact been interpreted and reinterpreted over the years for the benefit of the public. Where are we today? Are people being allowed to see snapshots the way collectors do?
Snapshots were first presented to the general public as found photos in the 1970s, after the âsnapshot aestheticâ photographers of the 1960sâArbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, and the restâhad opened our eyes to them as photography. Since that time we have seen a fair number of major shows and books of anonymous snapshots taken from one collection or another. These have often been sophisticated productions, but theyâve rarely been directly shaped by the collector, and in no case has the work of the collector (beyond the mere fact of his or her existence as the person who accumulated the photos) been fully recognized.
Iâve heard the idea expressed (especially by those with specifically photographic orientations) that snapshots âdonât go far enoughââthat they are, quite simply, limited. Well, the people who say that canât be faulted for not knowing how very personal snapshots can be: for not having been made aware of how immense and varied the underlying snapshot corpus is and how much a strong eye can do with it.
We have no objective basis for singling out any snapshot. Itâs all subjective: weâre just choosing something we like. The pool is so vast, so anonymous, and owes so much to chance that it couldnât be any other way; choosing a snapshot is really precisely like picking up a nice rock on the beach, if a rock could have as much formal, emotional, and historical texture as a photograph. Or, perhaps more to the point: choosing a snapshot is like taking a photograph. Winogrand claimed all he did was say yes, and a snapshot collector is saying yes in just the same sense.
No one has faced this truth squarely, and in fact it has often been obscured. But among its consequences is that any found photo is tied to the eye that chose it. Someoneâs eye, a personal aesthetic, gave it meaning; it remains an expression of that aesthetic. So a snapshot show or book that draws on a reasonably well-directed collection, unless it tries to do justice to the collectorâs eye, is making a complete mess. This lack of clarity about authorship, which has lately become extreme, is probably a lot of what has kept snapshots as marginal as they are: without an artist, they donât make sense as art. A naĂŻve but thoughtful gallery or museum visitor standing in front of a snapshot labeled simply âPhotographer Unknownâ or described as âvernacular photographyâ will be justifiably confused about whose creative imagination is at work here. Where did the art part come from? Did it just appear? If it crosses your mind to wonder who said this picture belongs on those white walls, you are beginning to feel something is wrong. Iâm sure plenty of people do.
You will say that the value of all art is inherently a subjective thingâthat thereâs no way to anchor an aesthetic taste in something that isnât ultimately arbitrary; and of course youâre right. And now we come to something else preventing snapshots from truly engaging with photography and catching on as art in good standing. Art markets function because they have eliminated the eye of the beholder, or at least well enough to make them happyâthrough an appeal to authority. To be worth money, to hold the promise of being worth more money in the future, and thus to be noticed at all, art generally needs to have an artistâs name associated with it, or at least a provenanceâa pedigree of some sort. Snapshots donât have either, and canât have either as long as the collector is left out of consideration. Imagine what would have happened to the Vivian Maier find if the material had been scattered and anonymous, like snapshots. Great as the individual pictures may be, they wouldnât have been commercially exciting without at least a hypothetical artistâs hand uniting them. And these are regular photos, not a fringy subgenre that doesnât even seem to have artists in the usual sense.
But lately the art establishment has found an easier way to make money out of snapshots, and that is to popularize them: to present them simply as fun objects from the pastâmade by people, full of humor and history, but not really art at all. This move sidesteps the central problem of whose art they are, which has only one solution and could have been dealt with once and for all. But it also takes them off the table as real photography.
That is where we are today. In retrospect, Thomas Waltherâs Other Pictures show of 2000, curated by the Metâs Mia Fineman, was the public snapshot event that came the closest to acknowledging the authorship of the collector. It was the first and only snapshot production to demonstrate clearly that a snapshot collection could have a look, though admittedly its look was no more than an imitation of the existing Modernist look admired by the collector. That show might have been a beginning, but it was an end. Since that time a slow softening has set in, one that looks irreversible; Iâll be surprised if we see another museum or gallery show or a legit book as serious as the WaltherâFineman show was almost fifteen years ago. The integrity of a phenomenon like Nick Osbornâs once and future website Square America proves the point: Square America would not have been possible except as a private operation outside the art establishment.
Snapshot collecting has always been a largely underground activity, and it will go on that way. No oneâs going to stop us from doing what we do. But the aboveground forces trying to turn snapshots into consumable kitsch are strongâthey have prevailed often enough in other corners of the art world. Does this really have to happen?
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