The Snapshooter

In response to yesterday's post, Calvin Amari commented:

"I know you are making quite a different and meaningful point, but, with all the spirituality and humanism of a toilet seat, I am going to ignore yours and make a different, coldly aesthetic one. What is notable about these vernacular family photos is that they overwhelmingly have zero aesthetic merit. We don't expect every commercial or amateur photographer to have a distinctive style or even a bare spark of creativity, but that batting average really ought not be infinitesimal—and trust me, I have touched and eyeballed hundreds of thousands of these images.

"While I collect modern and contemporary fine art photographs, as well as important 19th century works, for years I also amused myself by being what fine art photography dealers call a 'picker'—which is to say someone who finds vernacular work, or great pictures among vernacular work, that can and should be recontextualized into the fine art world. I am an image junkie, which allows me to go through a photo or ephemera fair like the raptor-in-the-kitchen scene in Jurassic Park (as I was once described in a newsstand magazine that you edited), but a junkie with an eye. (Modesty would detract from my point here.) One can talk about those finds that I bought for a pittance, sold to some of the best dealers in the world, who in turn sold them to important collections, public and private. But my point is to talk about the million instead of the one in a million. A large ephemera photo fair that will take a good 20 hours to plow through over a weekend is not a wellspring of wondrous aesthetic fecundity, and the portraits are the absolute worst. What is remarkable is that virtually all of them show no personality, aesthetic differences, or merit whatsoever. Isn't that weird?"

Mike replies: 'Tis indeed. Your comments, especially the one-in-a-million vs. the 999,999 part, reminded me of a section of a long article I wrote many years ago called "The Photographer's Menagerie." The article outlined the various types of photographer one might be, starting from the most common and advancing to the most accomplished. This is the first one of those categories. It's rather long. I haven't been as much of a picker as you were, and I'm certainly not as well connected to the art and gallery scenes as you, and some of the references are already outdated and quaint (Mickey Dolenz?), but still, it intersects somewhat with your points. It's called...

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The Snapshooter

...The essential photographer, the type genus, the very base of the great pyramid, is, as everyone knows, the snapshooter. His ranks, of course, are legion. His "language," though hopelessly polyglot, is widely influential: the so-called "snapshot aesthetic" has had an incalculable influence on high art photography during the last three decades.

But the actual snapshooter, like Rousseau’s noble savage, is a species greatly more admired in the abstract than in the event. As long as he is a hypothetical beast he is accorded much honor, and many claims are made for his accomplishments; but in the flesh, like the noble savages in real rather than imaginary rain forests, he is either held in contempt, exploited, or merely ignored.

Snapshots are thought to be like snowflakes, perfect, unique, ephemeral, and numberless. The archetypal snapshooter—or so goes the academical theory—is a sort of idiot savant. He exists in a state of grace; his work is pure, undimmed by expectation, undirected by intention, and undiminished by the imposition of ideas. His pictures are as immediate, as uncontrived, and as purely photographic in their nature as it is possible for photographs to be. The snapshooter is supposedly guileless, unrestricted, neither clotted up with tradition nor weighted down by the dulling strictures of the intellect—not only unrepressed, but irrepressible, and free; and the perfect snapshot is a masterpiece of effortlessness, innocence, natural grace, and disingenuousness—nothing less, some people feel, than the ultimate photographic expression.

This idealized impression is not exactly accurate. In fact, the occasional excellent snapshot is a fortuitous accident. As a class of photograph, actual successful snapshots—real pictures, I mean, as opposed to simply hypothetical ones that exist in some critics’ or theorists’ imaginations—are somewhat akin to the startling pearls of wisdom that occasionally occur to the minds of children, the sort of thing that made Art Linkletter famous. They have that same freshness, that same startling lack of connection to conventional thinking, that same directness, and by depending on these qualities, they do occasionally annex an undeniable insightfulness. But, in general, their existence depends on a principle similar to the one expressed by the maxim which states that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while: it is statistically true that if you throw a marble onto a square of lawn containing a million blades of grass, it will land on one of them, and the chances were an astonishing million to one that the marble should have landed on that particular blade of grass; but the statistic is misleading, because the marble had to land somewhere. By the same token, occasionally a snapshot comes to light that is aesthetically perfect, literally a one-in-a-million shot; but a one-in-a-million shot is also all that it is. It is not outrageous to claim that snapshots are to skilled photography what childish insights are to philosophy. This may not seem like a bad thing, in these relativistic times, depending on your point of view; but the romantic view of the snapshot as the purest and noblest form of photographic expression is, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.

And the archetypal snapshooter, of course, once unmasked, is recognized to be only your Aunt Henrietta, marshaling the family out into the blazing sun on Easter morning; or your little sister Jennifer with her disc camera at her best friend Kristen’s slumber party; or your father, Bud, with his fancy Nikon (on which he knows how to operate exactly six of the thirty-seven available controls), recording for posterity the deep-sea fishing trip he took with your little brother, including the seven bonita and the one flathead dolphin they caught, Spring vacation, 1979.

Generally the prints are smallish and much alike, the desired information is difficult to decipher, the photographer’s secondary intentions are near impossible to decode (the primary intention being simply to “get a shot” of, say, the Washington Monument); the hoped-for effect has turned out to be a disappointment, the color is off, and the drugstore has hacked cousin Eugene off at the shoulders (there, in the back row, third from the left) despite the fact that Eugene is presumed to exist happily whole and complete on the negative, as he is in real life, and as he was (or so your mother says) in the viewfinder. The random celebrity you happened to see at the shopping mall—Mickey Dolenz, say, formerly the drummer for The Monkees—is unrecognizable, to your friends, in the snapshot you took to prove you saw him.

If the pictures are older, either the yellows are fading, or else the whole print is yellowing.

Generally, as anyone who has looked carefully through an appropriately numbing plenitude of snapshots can testify, an overwhelming majority of all snapshots are simply bad pictures: dull, unimaginative, empty, and way, way too approximate. All this is not to suggest either that excellent snapshots don’t exist—of course they do—or that their existence is not an absolutely crucial tool to understanding the nature of photography. It is. But, as far as types of photographers are concerned, a casual snapshooter, despite his formidable reputation in some academic circles, is simply not much of a thing to be.

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I'm surprised how much this has dated. Hard to put a date on it; early 1990s at the latest. The only place it was ever published was in Ed Buziak's long-defunct Darkroom User magazine, under the nom de plume "L.T. Gray" (el tigre). (I notice that Ed has been busy in his retirement in the heart of France making art.)

Thank to Cal, whom I've been glad to see pop up on TOP again of late.

Mike

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Comments

[Kenneth Wajda]

I wrote about something similar regarding finding lots of photographs at an auction where people aren’t doing anything. And it reminds me of what people are doing nowadays with selfies. “Here I am here, now here I am here.” https://6x6portraits.wordpress.com/2023/03/27/a-whole-lot-of-pictures-of-a-whole-lot-of-people-doing-a-whole-lot-of-nothing/

[James Bullard]

I wonder, like the tree falling in the woods, if a snapshooter accidentally produces a one-in-a-million aesthetically perfect photograph but the photo is never seen by a photo picker with an eye to recognize its perfection, is it still perfect? Or is the perfection created by the beholder? The result perhaps of the way they were trained to think of perfection in photographs either by their formal education or the circles they move in.

My wife's great aunt was a snapshooter and most of her photos, from the perspective of a non-relative, were bad or more generously, not good. One though, sticks in my mind {http://jims-ramblings.blogspot.com/search?q=currie} as at least near perfect, an image of her brother with his firstborn. To me it is perfect, but my opinion is perhaps colored by the fact that many years after the photo was made I knew Stanley and his daughter.

I contend that there are no perfect images, only images that connect to an audience even if only to an audience of one. Isn't that the whole point of photography, to share with another person or persons something that struck the photographer as worthy of sharing? And I know from experience that an image that connects with one person often fails completely with others.

[Speed]

Snapshot or Not?

Immediately prior, Anders had been photographing the lunar surface with a 250 mm lens; the lens was subsequently used for the Earthrise images.

Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty.
Borman: Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled. (joking)
Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim?
Hand me that roll of color quick, would you...
Lovell: Oh man, that's great!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise

[Speed]

"Bud, with his fancy Nikon (on which he knows how to operate exactly six of the thirty-seven available controls) ... "

I was once responsible for an electronic device used in medical research of which we said, "It has more than fifty controls and no customer uses more than five ... but each customer uses a different five."

[DaveB]

This post is a ‘snapshot’. Read into the comment what you will, but I LOVED the post (both of them 😉)!!!

[Dave_lumb]

"What is notable about these vernacular family photos is that they overwhelmingly have zero aesthetic merit."

There's more to photographs and photography than aesthetics and, as MJ wrote in an earlier post about documentary, "personal expressivity".

I've been using cameras since 1976. As I've got older I've come to appreciate photographs that are primarily about what they depict far more than those that have been made for solely aesthetic or expressive reasons.

A casual snap of a family member may be treasured far more than a carefully staged portrait. There's a world of photography beyond that of the serious photographer and the gallery world.

We should treasure vernacular photographs. Those taken on smartphones might not survive as long as prints of old. Which will be a loss to future generations.

Of course there is no reason a photograph taken to show something can't be made with a view to aesthetics and/or expression. Form following content.

I realise I'm not making myself very clear but elitist attitudes to photographs, an egalitarian medium if ever there was one, really get my goat.

[John Krumm]

Of course "picking" is a good part of the art of photography. When I used to teach a small group of middle school kids digital photography, I would emphasize the process of becoming more picky with your photos, the idea that most of them do not turn out well, but part of developing an eye is learning to recognize when you got lucky. I would start the day by reviewing the previous week's photos, a few teacher's picks I thought were worth discussing, maybe three from each student. I do remember one student who was obviously gifted with her eye, and in her case it was hard to narrow it down, too many good ones.

[Michael Newsom]

Snapshots can have historical value. They also may have familial value. They usually were never conceived as artistic. However a conservator with an artistic eye could choose from a collection of snapshots a representative sample with artistic value. I am thinking of Kertez's book "On Reading" which I think has great artistic value as a collection of photographs that individually are essentially common snapshots. I despised the geographer J. B. Jackson's praise of vernacular landscapes which individually represent in pictures the 'butt ugly' of human culture. As a collection they should remind us of the need for artistic expression in our every day lives.

[Paul]

I would argue the vast majority of historical "snapshots" were never meant to be viewed by anyone other than family perhaps. There was never an intent of merit or technique. It was simply a documentaion important only to the beholder of the camera. In the digital age of social media, this has been overwhelmingly amplified.

[Richard Parkin]

Umm … I think I get more from these “nothing” photos than I do from endless beautiful photos of mountain peaks or quaint buildings. I also prefer the old family groups to the modern “here I am with a goofy expression before the leaning tower” kind of selfie that is popular nowadays. I think they often tell a story despite being “static”. For example. I particularly like Libby Hall’s collection of found photos of dogs, nearly all with (human) family members: https://tinyurl.com/y2yaevza .

[Kenneth Tanaka]

For anyone whose appetite for investigating the “snapshot” aesthetic further…
In 2007 Sarah Greenough curated an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington titled “The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978”. The catalog for the show is an interesting deeper dive into the worm can Mike has opened. It’s out of print but used copies are around.

Going a step further, toward painting, I found this particularly fascinating. Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard examines how some renowned late 18th/early 20th century painters used early snapshot photography in their painting workflow. This book is a catalog of a show from 2012 and can be a bit hard to find, and pricey. But it’s worth keeping it on your watch list if you also enjoy studying painters.

[David Aiken]

In Japan street photographs are called "snapshots". Daido Moriyama regards himself as a sharpshooter. I guess the Japanese might regard Henri Cartier-Bresson as a snapshooter.

Terms can have different meanings in different locations. Might I suggest that your characterisation of the snapshot might resonate with many photographers who have an american or european background but not at all with those with a Japanese background. I can't speak to those with other cultural backgrounds.

Personally I think the term "snapshot" is a very appropriate term to apply to street photographs but then I also think that if Alec Webb is right that street photography is 99.9% failure then your references to the "one in a million" shot are out by several orders of magnitude, you should be talking about the "one in a thousand" shot.

It's interesting to think that the average picture taker, not someone who thinks of themself as an "amateur photographer" or better, might actually be 1,000 times better than the "one in a million" hypothesis gives them credit for.