Looking for Snapshots

A weekly blog about found photos.

[lookingforsnapshots]

As many of you know, Tumblr has instituted some new rules governing the content of blog posts. I can’t really discuss the details and effects of the new regime without bringing the censorbots down on this post, but the upshot is that some of Looking for Snapshots is now offline, probably for good, and I expect more trouble. Beyond that, I think it makes sense to worry about Tumblr’s future.

Since I want Looking for Snapshots to remain online in its entirety, I’ve set it up on another platform:

https://looking-for-snapshots.blogspot.com/

I may soon remove whatever remains of it here on Tumblr.

I’ve taken this opportunity to add a few new posts to the Blogspot version. I’ve also reordered everything there so that the top-to-bottom sequence of posts follows that of the table of contents.

I’m still working out a few bugs. The infinite scroll may skip a post or two, for example. But the links in the table of contents will reach all of them, as will the “Random” button and the “Newer” and “Older” links inside the posts.

[lookingforsnapshots]

Contents

The section titles are clickable links.

Snapshots Found photos Collecting No. 1 Objects and time Truth and mystery Snapshot technology: color Tinting The intrusive camera “Innocence” Relationships Nudity Taste in snapshots; rarity Size Control The family Style: poses and posing Machines Formal accident: pictorial happenstance Formal accident: technical flaws Formal accident: wear and damage Degrees of mystery: who, what, and why The back “Amateur photography” Life Death Meta-shit Hyper-meta-shit Gallery 1 Multiple images Duchamp Foundness; the eye of the finder Composition and anachronism Feeling The limits of accident? Part I The limits of accident? Part II Uniqueness and responsibility Folk art Funk Irony and badness Extremes of condition Portraits; more responsibility Idealization Neighboring genres, Part I Neighboring genres, Part II Polaroids Wrap-up of pluses and minuses Gallery 2-A Gallery 2-B Collecting and selecting Is snapshot collecting true collecting? The look “Pseudomorphism”: snapshot politics, Part I “Pseudomorphism”: snapshot politics, Part II Tolerance Context The power of many Antiques Small blunt instruments The hunt Tricks Vagueness Misery What is good? Mortal tedium Public and private Imitation Beyond the collection [Untitled post] Gallery 3-A Gallery 3-B Gallery 3-C

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Gallery 3-C

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Gallery 3-B

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Gallery 3-A

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[lookingforsnapshots]

I am sure I never would have gotten interested in snapshots if I hadn’t felt from the beginning, however obscurely, that they were unlike other kinds of photos. I have spent some time here fleshing out that idea. The profound and multiform sloppiness of snapshots, for example, could only exist in a corner of photography where almost no one worried about it too much. That same sloppiness produced some wonderful things.

And: only snapshots, because their authorship is radically incomplete, put us in a position to do more with those wonderful things than passively appreciate them. We can use them the way we want to and supply the missing authorship ourselves. (When an appropriationist like Sherrie Levine copies the photographs of Walker Evans or Aleksandr Rodchenko, she is not using anything wonderful in them. She is using their very authorial completeness and no more.)

Is there a causal connection between the authorial incompleteness of snapshots and the wonderful things in them? Clearly there is. Clearly the things we think of as wonderful were allowed to enter to the extent that no artist was there to stop them. This correlation was absolute until art photographers noticed snapshots and began to imitate the effect of their own absence.

Snapshots are a form—a subcategory of photography with its own formal properties. When we snapshot collectors use snapshots as found photos, what can we do with them that really takes advantage of the form—that does with it what it most profoundly lends itself to? Unless we find a way of doing that, we are not really doing anything.

That’s not to say that everything snapshots do must flow directly from their formal properties. If that were true, snapshots would be the same in anyone’s hands. In fact, as I’ve said, the form is so capacious that everyone is alone in it: any mind will inevitably stake out personal territory within that vast space. Snapshot collectors are all doing something personal (though they may not be doing it consciously or well). Any snapshot production—show, book, or website—that fails to acknowledge or embody this truth has missed the point completely.

In the verbal component of this blog I have attempted to make that point as impersonally as possible. I have tried to say things any snapshot collector could say—and thereby stay out of the way of the pictures, which are truly mine.

Gallery 1 Gallery 2-A Gallery 2-B Gallery 3-A Gallery 3-B Gallery 3-C

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Beyond the collection

A found photo is a special kind of found object. But how about what Duchamp actually did with found objects? Was that anything like what a snapshot collector does? Let’s assume, as I generally do, that the snapshot collector is an aesthetically-minded one.

Unless I misjudge Duchamp, his relationship with his audience was not unlike that of a scientist, a performer, or a bomb-thrower, all of which he resembled: his art didn’t do the job for him personally until his discovery, his act, his provocation, met his public. But for someone like me the hunt and the having are ends in themselves. I enjoy both. In particular, finding a snapshot that hits the sweet spot, but is still a surprise, seems to enlarge me, just a little, in a very personal sense. But is it enough to keep doing that? Do the amassed photos necessarily amount to something? If finding a photo is like taking a photo, is a collection of found photos a body of work? Is it one thing in any significant sense? Certainly it is not usually a thing fashioned with presentation in mind, a thing intended for maximum effectiveness.

I’ve noticed that I am very hesitant to show my collection to other collectors. I am not proud of my collection as an object, though I am proud of many of the photos in it. Actually, I can’t really see it as a coherent object at all. I’ve had to admit to myself that, no matter how concentrated and distinct my aesthetic may become and no matter how faithful the individual photos are to it, I will never believe that thousands of photos can just be something that matters. Or perhaps what I believe is that a collection of photos is not yet what it can be, if presented properly. Many collectors seem to feel something similar: they group and arrange their pictures, make little books out of them, and so forth, as if the urge to search out, to recognize, and to amass—to exercise the aesthetic sense in acquisition—at some point gave way to the superordinate urge to build, to shape. Is it really impossible for a collection of photos to be greater than the sum of its parts—for something to simply emerge from an undifferentiated mass, like intelligence from a clump of neurons? Nick Osborn’s Square America might seem to suggest that it isn’t out of the question. Square America (not online as of this writing, though it may be restored) represented only a large subset of an even larger collection, but in principle it was capable of transforming a very large collection into a meta-object that made aesthetic sense, by taking advantage of the resources and the capacity of a website. Crucially, though, the site had a lot of internal structure—it was much more than just a vast array of photos.

So here too, collecting snapshots supplies the raw material for an object that has more to it than just the collection itself. Once again the analogy I am looking for is with the practice of a photographer. Even though every shot may be in some way an expression of that practice, that doesn’t mean the mere totality of them will hang together as a single aesthetic object. Why should it? In order to make them more than the unorganized issue of a long-term activity, something extra is going to be required, some sort of winnowing, grouping, and arranging. In the case of a photographer like Robert Frank, an edifice like The Americans will be very much greater than the sum of its parts, magnificent as they may be. And since those parts themselves are just the tip of the iceberg of an activity extending over a period of years—an activity that produced thousands upon thousands of pictures that never got used and would have to be judged experimental, like brushstrokes that a painter covers over or scrapes down—the finished book is a completely different order of thing from the daily gleanings that went into it.

For someone like me the two sides of the project are psychologically disjoint. In amassing the pictures I am beholden to no one. The activity is messy and pure fun. But in shaping the mass of them I consider the public, and myself. The activity is disciplined and less unambiguously fun, though it is far more urgent. I can still trick myself into thinking my own part in the business is a selfless one—by imagining that I am just showing the pictures to their best advantage or acting as their advocate—but it is more difficult.

[lookingforsnapshots]

Imitation

We know that snapshots are mostly boring, but a found photo—a snapshot or other non-art photo given meaning by someone who didn’t take it—can be boring, too: finding a photo can be as thoughtless an activity as taking one. Both logic and experience suggest that the percentages are no better for found photos than for any other kind. One way a found photo can be boring is to be derivative.

For example, it’s easy to use snapshots to imitate existing art photographers. There are snapshot collectors who got started doing just that; snapshots are a cheap (though labor-intensive) source of something approaching equivalents of name photography. I probably don’t need to point out that the name photographers most readily imitated this way are precisely those who learned the most from snapshot photography in the first place, such as William Eggleston in the top example.

We don’t have to imitate any existing photographer. Really, there’s no point, because the snapshot corpus has a lot else in it. It has so much in it that it also contains, must contain, “equivalents” of the work of any number of other art photographers who might have existed, but, as it happens, didn’t. The snapshot collector’s question should be, if I can put it this way: Which of them should I imitate?

It is also possible to imitate a more nameless but pervasive contemporary look, as in the second example. (I think I can guarantee, by the way, that the resemblance is fortuitous. On the back, in an immature handwriting, is this inscription: “Oshin, Oshin & Kym on the boat 8-31 / Lake Havasu.”) And it is possible not to imitate that look. Snapshots contain many, many more, including ones that have never been seen for what they are. The snapshot collector’s question should be: Which of them should I imitate?

Finally, it’s all too easy to imitate other snapshot collectors. In the last example I have tried to imitate the most influential contemporary snapshot style, that of Robert Jackson. The style is so solid that it sometimes seems necessary, as if it were not a found-photo style at all but an objective characterization of snapshot photography: it sometimes seems to be simply a presentation of something in the world, something “out there.” But it isn’t. Robert created it, with his mind. It could have been something else, except that he is who he is.

Considered most broadly, imitation is something you don’t want to get rid of: cultural transmission couldn’t happen without it. There’s no bright line between an artist who imitates and one who is (productively) influenced, or between an artist who isn’t doing anything new and one who is carrying on a tradition. An artist who imitates is probably one who loves, and love is a good thing. But here I am stressing the possibilities of snapshots. Have snapshots been understood? Do we have their measure? Are they known? I don’t think so. Snapshots are rich—plenty rich enough that, to the extent that we stop imitating, what we choose will reflect who we are. In principle, they are a true medium. To repeat last week’s question: Is this medium getting plowed under before we’ve even had a chance to explore it properly?

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Public and private

You’ve got your snapshots, you’ve got your found photos, and then you’ve 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 doesn’t 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 “snapshot aesthetic” photographers of the 1960s—Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, and the rest—had 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 they’ve 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.

I’ve heard the idea expressed (especially by those with specifically photographic orientations) that snapshots “don’t go far enough”—that they are, quite simply, limited. Well, the people who say that can’t 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. It’s all subjective: we’re just choosing something we like. The pool is so vast, so anonymous, and owes so much to chance that it couldn’t 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. Someone’s 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 collector’s 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 don’t make sense as art. A naïve but thoughtful gallery or museum visitor standing in front of a snapshot labeled simply “Photographer Unknown” or described as “vernacular photography” 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. I’m sure plenty of people do.

You will say that the value of all art is inherently a subjective thing—that there’s no way to anchor an aesthetic taste in something that isn’t ultimately arbitrary; and of course you’re 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 happy—through 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 artist’s name associated with it, or at least a provenance—a pedigree of some sort. Snapshots don’t have either, and can’t 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 wouldn’t have been commercially exciting without at least a hypothetical artist’s hand uniting them. And these are regular photos, not a fringy subgenre that doesn’t 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 past—made 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 Walther’s Other Pictures show of 2000, curated by the Met’s 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; I’ll be surprised if we see another museum or gallery show or a legit book as serious as the Walther–Fineman show was almost fifteen years ago. The integrity of a phenomenon like Nick Osborn’s 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 one’s going to stop us from doing what we do. But the aboveground forces trying to turn snapshots into consumable kitsch are strong—they have prevailed often enough in other corners of the art world. Does this really have to happen?

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[lookingforsnapshots]

Mortal tedium

Most snapshots are banal, and I don’t necessarily mind that, but I don’t want a boring picture in my collection.

These are hardly precise terms, but bear with me while I distinguish them. Before I get to the point I want to be as clear as it is possible to be about boringness, which is such an important part of our experience of snapshots: at least for those of us who find the bottom of the snapshot food chain a fruitful place to be, boredom is a condition of life.

When we say a snapshot is banal, we probably mean something about its subject, or about the circumstances of its making on the evidence of what we can see. Boringness can have to do with a photo’s pictorial qualities above and beyond that, but in any case it mostly has to do with how we feel. So banality is probably about them, about the snapshooters and what they chose to snap, and boringness is probably about us, about the viewers and what we like to view. We can make an easy judgment about banality that nearly everyone will be able to agree with; boringness is more individual, but I think we can still say that almost all snapshots are boring—the non-collector who sees only the gems in books or shows may not realize how horribly true this is. Usually snapshots are both banal and boring. Most remarkable snapshots, the ones that get into people’s collections, are banal but not boring. The rare snapshot that is not banal is probably also not boring for that reason.

I didn’t want to illustrate this post with a boring snapshot (that would have been boring). The next choice was one of those scarce non-banal, non-boring snapshots. An example with sensational subject matter—sex, death, what have you—would have been too easy. This one escapes banality (and boringness) through abstraction: the world it shows us is not the familiar household or holiday full of random clutter, but some stripped-down realm of smoke and cinder.

Now my point. It is very possible to feel that searching for snapshots that aren’t boring is in a sense doing an injustice to the great pool of almost entirely boring snapshots. It’s perfectly true that anyone who approaches snapshots the way snapshot collectors approach them will arrive at something unrepresentatively interesting. But how can we be interested in what isn’t interesting?

The answer is that the word “boring” as I am using it really means “visually boring,” whereas even visually boring snapshots are full of potentially interesting information—information about their subjects and eras and information about snapshot photography itself. Snapshots contain material for an academic history of the way people pose in them, for example; we've all noticed fads and fashions in poses over a scale of decades (I discussed some here). But visually such a history would be thin soup at best, at least if it stuck to its topic. It would be about something in the pictures, not the pictures themselves.

As far as I can see, the way snapshot collectors go at snapshots is the only way to extract visual pleasure from them. Pleasure is what it’s all about. We all have distinct tastes, but we are all in the business of finding something in snapshots that, statistically speaking, is barely there; our awareness of that rarity is in fact part of the feeling of foundness. A while back I compared collecting snapshots to picking up nice rocks on the beach. With the important exception that rocks don’t have a former life as meaningful objects, the analogy is pretty good. When we pick up a rock or find a snapshot, we are taking aesthetic pleasure in a freak occurrence—and not taking it in a million other occurrences that don’t rise to that level of freakishness. Is a beachcomber who picks up an especially nice rock somehow being unfair to all the other rocks? A geologist might think so, but a geologist just has a different project.

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[lookingforsnapshots]

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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Misery

“All photographs are memento mori.” Susan Sontag noticed this in 1977. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” The idea was reformulated a few years later by Roland Barthes (I discussed his version here). A photograph makes immortal what is not immortal. We know perfectly well it’s a lie, so to that extent any photograph (at least one of a person) is about death. It’s about death: I mean that a certain kind of mind will have good reason to feel death implied in any photograph, and that some degree of background deadliness may color anyone’s experience of photography.

In his notoriously uncomprehending New Yorker review of The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (you can read it here), John Updike puts the Sontag quote close to the top. It’s just a grand-sounding lead-in; the idea stalls out there and does not return until the next-to-last sentence, where Updike refers to the collector’s (Robert Jackson’s) “macabre traffic in silver-based shadows.” But is this really the same idea? Surely Updike is talking about the practice of collecting snapshots specifically, because at this point there wouldn’t be any reason to say that all photo collectors traffic in the macabre. What does he mean? Possibly nothing, apart from the gratuitous insult. But I think he is beginning to voice a feeling that makes sense.

Of course snapshots are macabre, and of course snapshots are more macabre than other photographs: it may take an outsider to really feel the truth of that. Far more than in other photos, in snapshots we see people not just alive, but living, poignantly engaged in their lives—poignantly because we have to imagine them no longer doing that living and not alive at all. Also: when we collect snapshots, we strip corpses to get them, so to speak; in most cases they wouldn’t come our way without the deaths of the people shown in them and without the destruction of the households in which they originally functioned. Finally, they no longer exercise that function. Snapshots are themselves dead when they leave those households, until we reanimate them for our own ghoulish purposes. If a snapshot in its original habitat was alive, a found photo in someone’s collection is a zombie.

I’ve more or less covered these points before, but I want to build on them to make a new one. Photographs (of people) are superficially about life; but, as I say, death shows through if we are inclined to see it. In the same way, snapshots are so determinedly, monotonously lighthearted that they seem to be hiding something. Snapshot cameras are, always were, tools for fun. They were officially meant for recording good times, even for being part of good times; and that’s when people brought them out, just as Kodak told them to do. But that gaiety so often seen in snapshots, the trace of moments positive enough that someone thought they were fit for the kind of photo a snapshot has always been supposed to be, is as false as the eternal life of the sitter in the photos that Sontag and Barthes were thinking of. Just as that photographic embalming hides, unsuccessfully, the death underneath, the happiness in snapshots is a paper-thin false front on the sufferings and horrors of the lives behind the pictures, an idealization shutting its eyes to all those moments that no one thought deserved to be photographed.

Any photo is an embalming job; in the same way, a snapshot is a forced smile. Occasionally we can sense the phoniness of the gigantic “Say ‘cheese’” that is snapshot photography, and once in a long while we get a direct look at what’s behind it, but we can always be aware of it if we are so minded. Like the Sontag–Barthes idea, this one is hard to shake once it gets through to you. It’s also hard to shake the thought that snapshot collecting is actually “traffic” in human misery, to use Updike’s unpleasant word, just as though we collected limp balloons and dead flowers from hospital rooms. How can we deal with this?

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[lookingforsnapshots]

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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[lookingforsnapshots]

Tricks

Snapshot collectors are keeping something from themselves. For whatever reason—perhaps because the rumors of the “death of the subject” have crippled us—we find it useful to pretend that all we’re doing is recognizing somebody else’s nice pictures. But in fact choosing snapshots is so personal that it’s effectively a way of rummaging around in our own brains: I see no escape from that conclusion, as long as we are choosing non-randomly. No, of course there isn’t necessarily a whole lot of expressive oomph behind what we do—it depends on the collector—but that’s true for straight photography too, and in the end a snapshot collector and a straight photographer are doing the same kind of thing. Choosing a picture is like taking a picture. We don’t have to really be conscious of that at every moment; for me, at least, it’s a troublesome truth that I can put to one side when I need to. Life is easier that way.

A psychological trick like this would not be possible without a category containing a vast number of very different, potentially expressive objects that (unlike nice rocks picked up on the beach, say) actually were made by someone else in a superficial sense, so that we can be quasi-objective about them and partly unaware of their personal value for us, at least sometimes. The category of snapshots fills that bill, and I am lucky to have happened on it.

Having realized that snapshots are expressive (a word that I understand very broadly), having realized that we, the collectors, are making them do some kind of personal work for us, in however weak and sloppy a way, it seems to me that we can’t go back. Now we have to do what we can to clarify things (while not spoiling the trick, if possible). If choosing a picture is like taking a picture, I think snapshots are daring us to try to make choosing a picture be as meaningful (in its own way) as taking a picture can be. I at least feel I must claim snapshots as completely mine and be up-front about it—and make them do all they are capable of doing for me, which I am convinced is a great deal. And why wouldn’t I? Unfortunately, the trick we play on ourselves as a matter of psychological utility has fooled the public too. In the era of “vernacular photography,” and I am not going to write that phrase without quotation marks, it seems all too easy to believe that found photos have nothing to do with the finder. On the other hand, the first found photos were seen correctly as exactly that, found photos, with all that was implied by the deliberate echo of Duchamp; “vernacular photography” is the revisionist interpretation. So maybe what we find all too easy to believe about found photos is more a matter of fashion, of art-world cycles.

People who don’t understand found photos can see them as a different kind of trick: as an art gimmick aimed at the public, one contrived to make a point beyond the pictures themselves. Possibly this view—exemplified in some of the response to Tacita Dean’s Floh, and arguably in the work itself—has become less common now that found photography (or “vernacular photography”) has established itself as a genre to some degree. In any case there is no such point, and I don’t like art that makes points. The pictures are all there is. They have, as a class, their own properties, which I like for their own sake. Snapshots do something for me that no other kind of photo could, and collecting snapshots does something for me that collecting no other kind of photo could. If I collected other kinds of photos, I couldn’t be anything more than a curator. Snapshots are so unique as a class that collecting them even does something for me that nothing else could. The public doesn’t enter into it.

A primitive attraction to a photo comes first, but higher faculties, less and less fooled by the trick I play on myself, sharpen what I do. They can organize and arrange, they are capable of being critical, and they can also be bored or embarrassed; they refine and shape my collection and in many cases overrule the lower faculties that don’t know how to do anything but like and choose. The process can be seen in action in pictures which, at the stupidest level, I still like, but which I have decided against or am in the process of deciding against. In this example the “higher faculties” have come to the conclusion that dummies and masks are too trite to tolerate, though you may feel this picture has other things going for it. For pictures that pass all the tests, a final step is to assemble them into larger units. That would help them, wouldn’t it?

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[lookingforsnapshots]

The hunt

Collectors know another great picture is out there. We aren’t just hoping—the numbers are with us. But the numbers are also against us. Statistical reality means we need bulk, and we need a constant supply of it: bulk today, bulk tomorrow, and bulk the day after that. Snapshot collectors are like whales straining plankton out of seawater—we have to go through thousands of snapshots every week in order to extract a bit of nourishment. Unlike a stamp collector, say, who is probably mainly interested in completeness, a snapshot collector has a diet.

Volume is indispensable for any sort of snapshot collecting, but it is possible to farm some of the work out—to be a white-gloves sort of collector who buys at high levels, after the volume has already been processed by others. I wouldn’t want to be that kind of collector. There is real pleasure in sorting through photos that no one has seen, and in being the first to recognize something extraordinary. Unsorted photos are also a fertile source of ideas, whereas a dealer’s selection represents at best a lot of pre-had ideas that limit the pool and surely limit your imagination. It would certainly be terrible to have to describe what you want to intermediaries, because that would mean you’d have to know before you saw it. Finally, suppose you have a special interest more special than some—a preoccupation too peculiar or difficult to explain for anyone to have spotted it as “a thing” or to cater to it. In such a case you simply have to do the work yourself.

Securing the daily quotient takes constant work. We can never have enough. Since the goal is not just to possess but to be surprised, enlarged, nourished, asking a collector to be happy with some number of snapshots is like asking a painter to quit at some number of paintings.

Collecting snapshots is unlike painting in that it is not a solitary affair. We can’t stay at home: the primary work of it (at least the time-consuming part that must precede anything else) involves aggressively scraping things out of the environment. We are constantly spending money and jostling with our competitors—other collectors with whom we may share an ecological niche and who may have more to spend. We are very much at the mercy of the marketplace if we want to continue to make progress with our collections, and not everyone is cut out for continuous acquisitive aggression. And since snapshots make the most sense when placed in some kind of context, meaning that ultimately they’re just material, it’s as if a writer had to keep laying out money and scuffling just to get words to work with. I am not happy with this aspect of snapshot collecting considered as an art-like activity.

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[lookingforsnapshots]

Small blunt instruments

I said earlier that the small size of snapshots is something that has to be worked with. It is perhaps the most conspicuous thing about them. Even though it is in a sense secondary—an adjunct to their purpose, their function as cheap personal mementos—it is number one among their sensory qualities. If we had to describe snapshots to someone who didn’t know what they were, we would probably say they were small before we said anything else.

As I pointed out, snapshot size can be harnessed straightforwardly. But the opposite impulse, some feeling that snapshots must compensate in one way or another for their relatively weak optical impact, probably afflicts most collectors. Even a photographically informed eye will often permit simplicities and crudities that would never pass muster in a larger photo.

Snapshot size may actually have had a pernicious effect on received snapshot values (there are such things). One case in point is that of overstatement. The first example measures 2¼” by 3⅜” (the inscription on the verso reads “abgesch. engl. Panzer”— “knocked-out English tank”). The picture is really all about extremity, and about finding it in the composition. There’s nothing else there, and that would not be enough to carry a larger print. Is it enough to carry this small one?

Needless to say, snapshot collecting is a highly personal and various thing, and even a given collector’s taste doesn’t stand still. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to generalize, to average the reigning snapshot aesthetic, so to speak. And I’d say overstatement of all kinds is common, even held in high esteem. To put it more strongly: snapshot taste leans toward the sensational. Snapshots that are aggressively freakish and/or over-the-top in effect or implication are popular. My diagnosis is a sort of Napoleon complex, a sense on the part of collectors that snapshots lack something and in compensation need something. It may be felt that there’s not much danger, because the whole problem is that the physical modesty of snapshots lowers their overall temperature. But obviously judgments will differ on how far. In any case I sometimes let the tradeoff stand. Garry Winogrand declared that it’s a photo’s job to dramatize, and I have to agree. Just the same, I will tell you that I yearn for subtlety in snapshots, and in a strange way their delicacy as visual stimuli just puts that further out of reach. If you are so quiet that you feel you have to shout to be heard, you are always shouting, no matter what your absolute or relative volume might actually be. I think it’s very possible that the best way to achieve subtle effects with snapshots is by assembling them: that is, by exploiting context (as I tried to do here).

The small size of snapshots seems to make all sorts of things more acceptable than they might be. I’ve mentioned the case of meaningless technical flash (here). Similarly, the second example (3” by 4¾”) is just a one-liner. But a one-liner can seem all right when there’s only room for one line. In a sense all three of these examples are one-liners.

Finally, the simplicity of the third shot (3½” by 5”) would not scale up in a larger picture. There it would just seem to be boring. I also think this photo would become more obviously pretentious if it were much larger.

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[lookingforsnapshots]

Antiques

In much contemporary collecting, a snapshot has to be old. For example, in his afterword to The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978, the collector, Robert Jackson, says, “I am too close to the 1980s and beyond to be able to ‘see’ a good snapshot [from that era] objectively.” This is probably a pretty widespread feeling.

I am not immune to the pull of the old, but I resist it somewhat. Age can contribute a lot, as we know. A certain patina can add historical density, and it can also function as a formal element in its own right. But a taste for the old can all too easily be a taste for nostalgia, and nostalgia probably won’t do. It’s usually a form of sentimentality and hard to put to good use in art (I continue to assume we’re interested in snapshots as art of some kind). Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong with a lovely nostalgia like Joseph Cornell’s, evoked precisely through the use of old images and old objects. And if someone thinks there’s no way for a contemporary artist to find anything but nostalgia, anything but some flight from the present, in old materials used specifically for their age, I would point to the grand and ferocious work of Bill Morrison.

But in any case I don’t see myself as in the business of amassing old objects. I am not a collector of antiques. I want a found image, an image that I can invest with meaning because it has lost its own—preferably an image “fortified” with tangibility and a third dimension and a past, if you like—and the snapshot pool is the place to go for one. By the snapshot pool I mean all the snapshots ever taken. The available snapshot pool, the group of pictures that surface in estate sales, auctions, flea markets, “paper” shows, and so forth, is heavy on the older pictures—partly because the newer ones are still functioning as family photos for extant families, and partly because so far there’s little demand for them. But I make an effort to include recent photos in my collection. I want my collection to say, among the other things I hope it says, that I am not interested in age for its own sake. If Duchamp had used only old objects as readymades, would we have felt something was wrong? I think we would have. And we might have been so confused that we missed the point altogether. For me the image, “found” in my parasitic, hermit-crab sort of way, is primary: I want that to be as clear as possible. That message, and anything else I might be trying to do with my collection, would be muddled if I seemed to be unduly bewitched by age itself.

The 1980 dividing line observed (consciously or not) by many snapshot collectors and ignored by me coincides with the important change in snapshot format that I mentioned earlier. A “recent” photo is generally a borderless print, usually glossy and 4” x 6”, the kind we all know. What are snapshot collectors who exclude recent photos really bothered by, and what am I trying not to be bothered by? Could it be the relative insubstantiality of borderless prints as objects? We will know the answer in a decade or two. But I find it highly significant that fairly recent photobooths and Polaroids seem to strike people as collectible.

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