How to do things with snapshots*
Joel Rotenberg
But this is not an art photo like one of Frank’s. It is an actual snapshot, anonymous and entirely ordinary in all its technical aspects, taken long before The Americans appeared. The setting is not a gun shop, which might have interested Frank, but, I believe, a museum; the woman on the far side of the display case is probably a friend or relation of the photographer. The picture’s resemblance to anything we may be familiar with in art photography is almost certainly a complete accident. The potency of the image is real enough, but it’s a fluke, the cumulative effect of a series of chance details: the mass of weaponry squeezing the subject into the top third of the composition, the seeming irony of the jaunty tilt of her hat, and so on.
There are people who search for such pictures: snapshots—everyday family photos—in which they see things the photographers didn’t intend. I found this snapshot at a flea market among some others evidently taken by the same person. None had struck the dealer as anything special and all were priced at a dollar. The fortuitous qualities of this one caught my eye. Other kinds of accidents (we will get to some) create images that might appeal to different tastes.
There are also people who put snapshots on display in art institutions. Beginning in 1998, snapshots taken by anonymous photographers have been exhibited in museums and galleries many times—but not always because a collector like me or anyone else considered them extraordinary. The rationales and assumptions governing snapshot shows are different each time; all in all, curators have made their case so poorly and inconsistently that to date there is no clarity about what it means to display snapshots for an art-consuming public. How can non-art photography be art? So what if someone like me enjoys an image that was essentially assembled by fate? Have I elevated it somehow? Doesn’t art have to be made by someone? If snapshots aren’t art, is there any other way to appreciate them? Snapshots as a genre have stayed open to reinterpretation over the last twenty years only because no one has solved these puzzles.
1.
Was snapshot photography really such a departure? Yes, it was. The cameras were of course technical novelties and produced photos in unfamiliar shapes and sizes. They were not an advance, though. In fact the most conspicuous innovation of the new photography was that it looked very much like a sharp decline in the state of the art. The cameras were designed to be easy to use, but that meant taking control away from the user. And they were designed to be cheap, which meant the technology was only as good as it had to be. Actually, it was often far worse. Both equipment and processing tended to introduce all sorts of unintended effects: a certain random element went with the territory. That profound technical variability got by because the non-art purpose of the new photography made it irrelevant, just as Kodak had predicted. But to most art photographers, snapshots were an industrial-age debasement, like inexpensive but flavorless factory-made bread. It didn’t yet seem interesting that the new cameras were being used for new reasons, in new places, on new occasions—and by people who had never taken pictures before; that the photos showed a side of life that photography had always ignored; that the way they showed it embodied an entirely fresh attitude toward photographic images and their purpose. The characteristic feeling of snapshots, created by the new snapshot form together with the new snapshot content, went mostly unnoticed for a long time. The example above is a good illustration of both, though it dates from a more recent era: its technical inadequacy and banal subject matter had no place in photography before the advent of snapshots.
After seventy years or so of generally considering snapshots a vulgar irrelevancy, American art photographers suddenly saw their potential. In the late 1950s and 1960s, first Robert Frank and then many others began to incorporate elements of snapshot feeling into influential styles. Frank actually liked the formal roughness of snapshots, for example. In his own pictures he put it to work as a badge of veracity, an attestation that the photographer couldn’t be faking because he didn’t seem to have much control. Perhaps predictably, what had once seemed coarse to art photographers when it wasn’t art now looked coarse to the public when it was. When The Americans appeared, the magazine Popular Photography had nothing good to say about the “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness” of the style—about the vocabulary of snapshotty randomness that Frank deliberately courted.
Frank borrowed another aspect of snapshot photography for a similar reason. As we know, snapshots are meant to be private. Most often they function as a sort of photographic family diary, and so any snapshot that isn’t ours—like a page from someone else’s diary—is just a contextless sliver of what is in any case not our story, and in that sense can only be obscure to us. Frank’s tantalizing narrative fragments were like the opaque mini-anecdotes of snapshots seen in isolation. And once again, the implication was that Frank just happened along and caught the truth in action—that its ambiguity was the price paid for getting it on film at all.
The “snapshot aesthetic,” as it has been called, took different forms in the work of other photographers. Diane Arbus, an urban adventurer whose photos were in part her way of bragging about the depths she’d plumbed to get them, needed a snapshot-like intimacy with her human specimens in order to convince the viewer that her world really was low-down enough to include them. To capture something approaching the personal directness of snapshots, their built-in psychological attunement, she actually got to know her subjects the way snapshot photographers know theirs. The street photographers Vivian Maier and later Lee Friedlander allowed their own shadows and reflections—their own undisguised point of view—into their pictures: they did deliberately, as art, what snapshot photographers did accidentally or as a gag. Later still, William Eggleston’s all-accepting “banality”—actually a devastating demonstration of the luminous non-banality to be found in the ordinary phenomenal world—and his scandalously déclassé color (as it appeared at first) both followed the example of snapshot photography.
And so on, in an unbroken line down to the present. The original “snapshot aesthetic” photographers’ broad destruction of barriers, determined rudeness, and attraction to the demotic were hallmarks of the era and went far beyond photography, even beyond art; they carried a political charge. But the barriers stayed down. Snapshots remain relevant, as we can see in the vivid contemporaneity of photographers as varied as Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Alex Webb. There are plenty of younger artists experimenting with cellphones and other mobile devices, and I am sure that aspects of snapshot photography will continue to exercise some formal fascination as long as the technology keeps renewing itself—as long as the medium seems technically fresh.
2.
Consider once again the casual documentary force that Robert Frank admired so much in snapshots. For the most part this was something he tried to get at through shooting style. “Cheap, quick, and dirty, that’s how I like it!” as he said in a slightly different context: the same scenes could have been shot differently, but a snapshotty funkiness seemed to suggest a snapshotty truth. It added, if not transparency itself, then a sign of transparency. Some years after Frank, another snapshot appreciator in quest of transparency, Stephen Shore, began to see style—even a snapshot-influenced style like Frank’s—as something inherently in conflict with the purity of the documentary purpose that he believed photography was meant for. So Shore tried to unlearn everything he thought he knew about how to shoot. He tried to remove the art from his pictures, leaving only what he saw. It was an interesting but obviously doomed project.
Transparency is amped up another notch because a snapshot photographer is not just indifferent to professional goals and standards (this indifference is why I and others prefer the term “snapshooter” to “photographer,” however qualified). A snapshot photographer is a liver of ordinary life who happens to be carrying a camera. The pictures don’t look at a situation, but rather emerge from the midst of it, from the midst of someone’s life; so that from our point of view they seem to penetrate to a unique depth. The strength of this feeling obviously stands in a push–pull relationship with what we normally think of as art, in the same way that a diary (an anonymous one, let’s say) becomes fishy to the extent that it reads as literary.
Applied to people, the cast of characters in the snapshooter’s ambit, transparency is just the feeling of unfeigned human intimacy that Diane Arbus tried to replicate. The implied intimacy in the example above is the source of its power to shock. A snapshot is not meant for public consumption and can take us deep into people’s private lives; what we find there is sometimes more terrible than anything another kind of photo could show us.
3.
More or less simultaneously in the late 1970s, both Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes saw that every photograph, at least if it depicts a person, is a subtly ghoulish artifact from the viewer’s standpoint. Photography is a lie, like embalming. It makes people look alive even when they’re dead. We know perfectly well they’re dead, or will be soon enough, and so the imitation of life just makes matters worse. This undertone—one that will be felt in any photograph by those inclined to feel it, and perhaps subliminally, to some degree, by everyone—is even more pronounced in the case of snapshots exactly because they are transparent: they come to us from the front lines, from the thick of life as it is being lived. The people in them seem that much more vividly alive, and thus the fact of their death, if we are of a mind to consider it, is that much harsher. So if photography is deadly, snapshot photography is especially deadly. The effect works for contemporary snapshots too (just as transparency does), but it’s stronger when snapshots are old and document a relatively distant past—when a visceral awareness that these actual pieces of paper were made long ago is part of our experience of looking at them. Unlike other kinds of photos, snapshots tend to live hard lives. If a snapshot’s very physical condition tells us that it survives, as an object, from more or less the moment it is showing us, then to that extent it’s “about” the passage of time. Art photographers don’t have a way of getting at this quality, because they deal in new images, not old objects.
Snapshots become even more morbid if we think about the personal value that these objects may have had and what they may have gone through to reach us. I happened to hear one viewer’s response to a group of snapshots: “Oh! These people are all dead!” I don’t think a pile of professional photos—even old professional photos, even old professional photos of corpses—could have evoked the same feeling. It’s a powerful idea that a snapshot you are holding, one that may once have been as precious as a possession can be, that may show someone in the most poignantly lighthearted or intimate of moments, may well be all that remains of them.
Snapshot feeling goes far beyond transparency. It is created by a range of formal and aesthetic characteristics that art photography can in some cases mimic, but never reproduce. I mentioned the way snapshots tend to age like the objects they are. A little more generally, people originally felt and lived with snapshots as objects, rather than mere images, which makes us feel them the same way: in addition to age, hard use and defacement can seem formally integral, as in the case of the cubistically crumpled photo above. Written or drawn material on the back of a picture can contribute a similar effect. I’ve also pointed out the pervasive impact of chance at all levels: snapshots are ultimately just lucky to have whatever visual appeal they may seem to have, and our awareness of that stochastic marvelousness contributes a shade of feeling. Another important property of snapshots is their mystery, an absolute, irreducible, forever teasing question mark hovering faintly or brightly above every single picture; in part this is just the residue of transparency—what snapshots convince us is completely real but don’t explain. One more powerful element of snapshot feeling, one that is completely beyond art photography, is unconscious self-revelation. The snapshooters could not have guessed what they are showing us about themselves and their lives, and the effect can be devastating.
4.
Until fairly recently, non-art photos seen in an art context were known standardly as “found photos,” a deliberate allusion to the tradition of objets trouvés established by Marcel Duchamp long ago; Duchamp, the progenitor of artistic repurposing, remains a necessary point of reference. Bottle Rack (1914) was a utilitarian industrial object that Duchamp had the wit to place in a sculptural context, in which its new value was original with him. What collectors do with snapshots is more sophisticated and more demanding than it was, but at bottom it still involves a Duchampian attribution of aesthetic value to a kind of photography that was never intended to have any. To “find” a photo is first to recognize, in a very, very large pool of non-art photos, the accidental and statistically unlikely satisfaction of what may be highly individual aesthetic criteria, and then to symbolically make oneself the artist by asserting ownership over the source of that satisfaction. In the example above, the effect is obviously accidental, as is the secondary effect of the lab’s documentation of the primary accident; I gave the photo its value when I deliberately misinterpreted it, when I found a way to enjoy something that was never meant to be “enjoyed.” In other cases I am taking advantage of more subtle kinds of inadvertence. In any event the snapshooters were not “amateur photographers,” just as the anonymous industrial designer responsible for the bottle rack that became Bottle Rack was not some low-grade sculptor. The artist’s job in both cases is to move the object from one frame of reference to another and do it in an interesting way.
Like the original value of that bottle rack, a found photo’s original value is gone forever. We all know what snapshots are for; we take them for ourselves and our families, and no one else will ever have access to any part of the personal meaning they carry for us. Unlike an art photo—or a news photo or a commercial portrait photo, no matter how antique—a snapshot seen outside the small world that produced it is ordinarily an entirely meaningless object, one that has outlived its usefulness. But a snapshot that becomes a found photo means something to someone in our world. In our world, it is a pleasurable image.
But there’s an important difference between what Duchamp did with that bottle rack and what snapshot collectors do with snapshots. Bottle Rack doesn’t make us think about the people who originally made it, never mind document their existence. Even though it was plucked from a world that was not the art world, it has no power to suggest that world—it’s not even a little bit “transparent,” in my terms. A Duchampian readymade, in a word, is all about the artist and his time. By contrast, a snapshot brings us into that world as forcefully as an object that survived from it ever could. So a snapshot in the collector’s frame of reference—a found photo—is a compound of old and new. We may have taken it out of context to wrest aesthetic pleasure from it, but it still hasn’t lost any of the feeling produced by the specific characteristics of snapshots—transparency and all the rest—which in fact are usually being played on in some way. To put it another way, a found photo “remembers” its past life as a snapshot. In this respect a found photo gives us much more to work with than your old-fashioned found object could.
A second difference between Duchamp and snapshot collectors is that Duchamp never admitted to having purely sculptural reasons for choosing one found object over another, whereas snapshot collectors are up-front about applying their own photographic criteria to snapshots. The universe of snapshots is vast and varied; the extreme winnowing carried out by each snapshot collector inevitably reflects a personal aesthetic. Many snapshot collectors think of themselves as artists, and in fact it’s not easy to argue away an analogy between the collector’s purposeful choice and the documentary photographer’s selective frame around something in the real world.
I don’t think there is another coherent class of found objects that allows for an unlimited number of individual expressive vocabularies, as snapshots do. What is it that makes the enterprise possible? Without substandard equipment and processing and radically unprofessional snapshot photographers, random variation would not occur. Without an astronomical number of snapshots, random variation would not produce anything that met the demands of an individual eye very often. And without a category of profoundly unowned imagery, the rare snapshot that did look good to someone could not be reclaimed for a private purpose. “Finding” a beautiful snapshot is perhaps something like picking up a nice rock on the beach, if only a rock could have as much formal, emotional, and historical texture as a photograph.
Ultimately, found photos are impersonal strokes of luck made personal. The random element permitted by poor control at all levels affected the image on all those levels. It affected the content of the shots and thus their effectiveness: chance composed the shot of the woman in the bedroom—oppressive ceiling, expanse of gilded bed and all—and helped give it its meaning. Poor control affected how those shots were realized as photographic objects: the nuclear-age birthday cake was created by a technically inadequate camera. And it affected what happened to those objects later: neglect and fate shaped the freakishly crushed portrait. A random accretion of random elements will occasionally produce an image that someone like me considers pleasing enough to “find.” Snapshots are such a powerful engine of randomness that they are essentially an engine of ideas, ideas that can then be marshalled as a coherent visual language. Collectors use such a language to explore different aspects of snapshot feeling, just as the “snapshot aesthetic” photographers did.
5.
Snapshot collecting is about as old as the “snapshot aesthetic,” but it wasn’t until 1998 that a museum show, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA’s) Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, seemed to take snapshots seriously. Even then, the selection was unfocused. Aside from being the breakthrough show, The Photography of Everyday Life did no one clear thing with snapshots—perhaps partly because the curator, Douglas R. Nickel, realized that snapshots are no one clear thing:
[A]ctual snapshots are taken with objectives only peripherally related to those of high art. . . Without discounting the importance of the constitutive social and technical factors that motivate this class of photographic object into being, we must grant that there is a fascination to certain examples that allows them a kind of afterlife, a license to circulate in other contexts. When the snapshot becomes “anonymous”—when the family history ends and the album surfaces at a flea market, photographic fair, or historical society—and the image is severed from its original, private function, it also becomes open, available to a range of readings wider than those associated with its conception.[1]Nickel saw the two “lives” of found photos: they were taken for certain reasons, but are appreciated for others. Any snapshot is full of information about its past life. It was made for reasons, under circumstances, and in ways that we can generalize about, if we are so minded (the “constitutive social and technical” sources of the genre haven’t changed much since the first Kodak). But once we start looking at it more than academically, as The Photography of Everyday Life invited us to do—that is, once it becomes a found photo—we are understanding it in a new context, an art context, and understanding it differently there.
If a snapshot is ordinarily just visual information—documentation of the social history it depicts or of the photographic history it embodies—a snapshot collector gives it a personal reinterpretation as a picture. But we may be more interested in historical and social documents than in pictures. We may not want to reinterpret anything. Since The Photography of Everyday Life, public presentations of snapshots have felt a choice had to be made: they have either downplayed or highlighted the work of the collector. They have treated snapshots either as history or as found photos—either as evidence of the uses that snapshot cameras have been put to or as images that someone considers extraordinary.
The first truly consequential snapshot production, the Metropolitan Museum’s Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection (2000), was very much an artist’s show, though no one really came out and said so. Unlike The Photography of Everyday Life, Other Pictures had a look. The curator, Mia Fineman, writes in the catalogue:
The canonical master photographers of the twentieth century seem to haunt these pictures like a pack of jealous ghosts. We sense the austere lyricism of Walker Evans in an unassuming view of a room’s corner with several studio portraits pinned to the wall; a melancholy showgirl standing on the street in a feather headdress and upturned skirt might have been shot by Brassaï; a picture of a boy in a field reaching down to catch a baseball has all the graceful resolution of a Cartier-Bresson. There are Eugène Atgets, Alexander Rodchenkos, Man Rays, Robert Franks, Eugene Meatyards, Diane Arbuses, and Gerhard Richters—all anonymous, all manqués.[2]Other Pictures brought to mind a certain period in the history of art photography not because snapshots do or ever have, but because the photos were selected by a photography collector, Thomas Walther, who specializes in the same period: the show was a continuation of his taste by other means. A few of his choices might have been self-conscious experiments by the snapshooters, but generally speaking the pervasive echoes of art photography were random occurrences in a snapshot corpus that is as good as infinite. Another collector would have found something else, but—with enough application and assistance—Walther was able to find what he was looking for. And what he was looking for was an extended formal analogy with something he knew and loved. At the top of this section is an example (drawn from my own collection) that may give an idea of Walther’s style. With its classical referents and lack of snapshotty elements such as transparency, it doesn’t have much of what I care about—it is essentially an art photo of the 1920s or 1930s technically dumbed down to snapshot level. But Walther was the most purely Duchampian of snapshot collectors: unlike his counterparts today, he was entirely unconcerned with the past lives of the photos. He never noticed any of the qualities (such as transparency) that distinguish snapshots from art photography, beyond the brute fact that these are separate genres. The sophisticated joke-homage expressed by the comparison was enough.
Whatever else might be said about it, Other Pictures was a clear representation of one collector’s eye. The next show was not so clear. The National Gallery’s The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (2007) had Robert Jackson’s collection on the walls, but the show was a responsible cultural and technical history of snapshot photography and the photos were only examples. The result was confusion—a scholarly chronology with illustrations drawn from a refined, personal, and entirely ahistorical collection, a collection of found photos par excellence. Much as if (let’s say) the photos of Weegee had been used to illustrate a history of crime photography, Jackson’s pictures went far beyond the genre they were supposed to characterize: anonymous snapshots or not, they were truly his. Yet the show wasn’t interested in their spirit and made no effort on its behalf. At the same time the viewer was left with the false impression that these idiosyncratic pictures were typical of snapshots as a whole. The show’s very title, The Art of the American Snapshot, suggested (counter to Douglas Nickel’s common-sense view) that snapshots were a kind of folk photography—that the people who took the photos were the artists, not the collector. The head curator, Sarah Greenough, said it clearly: “[F]ew scholars, historians, or curators have examined the evolution of this popular art in America. . . That is what this book and exhibition seek to do.”[3]
There have been no major snapshot shows since The Art of the American Snapshot. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous small-scale presence that snapshots have carved out in American museums is based on a shared understanding of what snapshots are: in a final turn of the screw, they have become effectively academic. Snapshots today have taken one last step to avoid the muddle of The Art of the American Snapshot. No longer are they decontextualized masterpieces, created entirely by chance operations and ratified by the eye of a collector, yet misleadingly billed as illustrations of snapshot history. At last they actually are realistically modest images being considered in their original contexts. Categories are all the rage these days: the scene in this country is dominated by the enthusiastic snapshot classificationist Peter J. Cohen, for whom groupings of interest might be thematic (hula girls, let’s say, or American flags) or technical (double exposures or other kinds of errors). This is no photographic taxonomy in the spirit of August Sander or Bernd and Hilla Becher, but, at its best, a gesture toward one or more small facets of snapshot history. Again and again museums build large frames around an entire fifteen- or twenty-picture category, telling us in effect that we shouldn’t scrutinize the individual examples too closely. In fact they really aren’t much to look at, either separately or arrayed, but that’s all right—visual interest isn’t the point. As displayed, these photos aren’t meant to be remarkable. They’re meant to be representative. It’s very possible to feel that, unexceptional as they are, these are the “real” snapshots: snapshots unfiltered, unshaped, unaestheticized by a modern eye.
Summing up the exhibition history: SFMOMA’s The Photography of Everyday Life understood that the snapshooters weren’t artists, but the Met’s Other Pictures couldn’t quite acknowledge its own demonstration that the collector was one. The National Gallery’s Art of the American Snapshot nominally presented the art of the snapshooters, but actually presented the art of the collector. The idea that the imaginative eye in question might belong to the collector is, it would seem, not easy to face. The most recent step has disposed of that troubling thought entirely. While The Art of the American Snapshot was at odds with itself because, contrary to its overt message, it bore a strong authorial stamp—that of the collector, Robert Jackson—the snapshots now in museums achieve unity of purpose simply by not being distinctive. They aren’t really “found photos” at all. They’re still just snapshots.
The solution is at least clean—but it’s back to square one: apart from the trivial categories, it’s as if the three major shows never happened. There are of course schools of critical thought, and thus schools of museology, that like to examine works of art in their social and historical contexts. But a snapshot in its original context was not a work of art. It was a photograph, but, as photographers friendly and unfriendly have always realized, it was its own kind of photograph.
Snapshot photography is no longer being presented as art—either the art of the snapshooters or the art of the collectors. The first idea is nonsense, and the second is in full retreat. It might be wondered what snapshots are doing in art museums.
6.
Not one of the four official interpretations has even demonstrated any awareness of snapshot feeling. So the way the pictures work and what they do, everything the “snapshot aesthetic” photographers saw in them and much more besides, is not coming through to the public. In that sense I think we can say that all four interpretations up to and including the reigning one, under which snapshots are empty tokens of a superficial category or of the genre itself, are wrong.
Snapshots “can’t be too good”: this was one contemporary curator’s way of expressing the current institutional attitude. He meant that our standards of photography are irrelevant, and that the chance operations involved in creating a “good” snapshot are irrelevant too. Unfortunately, no number of characterless and unlovable photos is going to make the least impression on anyone, and grouping them into unilluminating subject categories won’t help. The great snapshot corpus is dilute: it doesn’t show anything all by itself, and an essentially random sample of it won’t be any better. But collectors try to concentrate it. The inherent characteristics of snapshots, such as transparency, are what drew them to snapshots in the first place, and so of course they’ll want to highlight them in their own fashion.
It’s paradoxical, in a way, but the upshot is that if you (consciously or not) consider snapshots to be examples of a folk photography that you want to respectfully show off in its folky, unvarnished state, you won’t be showing it off. You’ll be selling it short. Whereas if you embrace the authorlessness and statistical freakishness of truly potent snapshot images, you can make use of the ones that interest you to present the genre to its advantage. In sum, the decision to present snapshots simply as the non-art photography they were before anyone found them is not just wrongheaded. It has the practical museological consequence that the value of the pictures goes unseen.
In this country—where snapshot cameras were invented, where snapshot style was absorbed by art photography, where snapshots themselves were first displayed, where every significant snapshot show has been mounted, where most snapshot collectors live and most snapshot collecting goes on—less and less snapshot potential is being realized, not more. But in Europe, snapshots are new, and they’re hot. It’s too soon for a museum show, but as of this writing snapshots exhibited in galleries are being understood as the art of the collector: snapshots are found photos.
Thierry Struvay’s recent book Love & Hate & Other Mysteries (August Editions, 2016) is a step in the right direction. Struvay makes creative use of the very snapshotty elements of defacement and mutilation. The photos have an extra-pictorial, even metaphysical thrill (the example above is my own). But their specifically snapshotty power comes from transparency, which forces us to imagine the extremity that drove a real person to deliberately ruin what was presumably a meaningful possession. If a heart-shaped void replaces a head, for instance, we think of a locket. If all we have is the left or right half of a photo of a happy couple or if one of the members has been obliterated in some way, we think of an estrangement. In aggregate, these and many other cases in the book produce a record of urgency and heat that could not be suggested so directly and undeniably—so transparently—by other photographic means. My point is that Struvay is wielding snapshot feeling. He has gotten hold of a nontrivial formal property of snapshots and is presenting it so that we can appreciate its meaning. Unfortunately, the publication of Struvay’s book doesn’t show that the American scene is stirring. Although the book was produced here, Struvay is part of the recent Franco-Belgian snapshot efflorescence.
To do things with snapshots, we have to make effective use of what they and only they have to offer. As far as I can see, all they really have to offer is the unique way we feel them—the way they work on us as photos (or photo-objects). A snapshot of a hula girl differs from another kind of photo of a hula girl only insofar as something about the form other than the subject, something the photographer didn’t know about, makes us apprehend the subject differently. The trick is to tease that out. We’ve barely begun to learn how to exploit the content of this truly vast resource. But first we have to realize that it’s there. So far there has been no public demonstration, no sense on the part of institutions that might provide one, that snapshots have something special going for them as bearers of photographic meaning. Any such demonstration would require decent pictures, presented so as to bring out that meaning.
New York, November 2018
[1] Douglas R. Nickel, “The Snapshot: Some Notes,” in Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 12–13.[2] Mia Fineman (ed.), Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000), unpaginated afterword.
[3] Sarah Greenough et al., The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 3–4.
*In composing this essay, I benefited from conversations with Erik Lieber, Wayne Macedo, Mel Monroe, Roc Morin, Nick Osborn, and others who may not want to see their names here. The errors, problems and infelicities that undoubtedly remain are to be attributed to me.
You can download a printable version of this essay here.
For more discussion, and more photos, see:
Looking for Snapshots
The Art of the Snapshot?
All photos are from my collection and copyright © Joel Rotenberg. All text is copyright © Joel Rotenberg.
You can contact me at jrotenberg@mindspring.com.
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