Outside Art: Exhibiting Snapshot Photography

Author(s): Catherine Zuromskis

Source: American Quarterly , Jun., 2008, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Jun., 2008), pp. 425-441
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 425

Outside Art:
Exhibiting Snapshot Photography
Catherine Zuromskis

"The Art of the American Snapshot, 1 888-1 978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson."
Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, October 7-December 31, 2007.
Exhibition curated by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner.

"Accidental Mysteries: Extraordinary Vernacular Photographs from the Collection of John

and Teenuh Foster." Organized by the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, September 24,
2005-January 7, 2006. Exhibition curated by Olivia Lahs-Gonzalez with John Foster.

October of 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a group of volunteers

from Erie, Pennsylvania, traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi, to collect family
snapshots that had been separated from their owners by wind and flood.
The volunteers installed boxes at local Wal-Mart stores where people could
drop off any anonymous photos they had come across. The photographs left in
the drop boxes were then scanned and posted to a Web site so that hurricane
survivors could pore over the images and, potentially, find and reclaim precious
records of their family histories. The Picture Project, as the organization is
called, takes to heart the oft-repeated assertion that the first things one saves
from one s house in the event of a disaster, and conversely the most tragic things
to be lost, are the family snapshots. While any number of domestic objects
may hold significant financial or sentimental value - grandmothers pearls,
the family bible, title deeds, diplomas, or other personal documents - nothing
seems to rival the album or shoebox full of family photographs as a souvenir
of the past, a record of family history, and an existential and indexical trace
of the self. Though the Picture Project Web site acknowledges that many Ka-
trina survivors likely had more pressing concerns than recovering old photos,
the organizers also assert that "once a moment in time has passed, unless it
has been captured in a photo and that photo saved, the physical memory is
gone . . . Without this project, some families will lose their entire history in
photos."1 Snapshot photographs, they suggest, embody, and at times even
replace remembered familial histories. By the same turn, and shifting focus

©2008 The American Studies Association

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426 I American Quarterly

from the family to the visual object itself, we might also say that a family's
history and identity constitute a significant part of the snapshot photographs
meaning and reason for being. Once a personal photograph is separated from
the individuals who inscribe it through oral narrative, preservation, and
interpersonal exchange, the photographs history is lost as well. Divested of
the kinds of personal associations and subjective meanings that are so rarely
evident in the photograph itself, the lost or abandoned snapshot is rendered
mute and meaningless, an arcane document of an unknown life. Thus, by
putting found snapshots on the public stage of the Internet, the Picture Project
seeks not only to restore family histories, but also to rehabilitate images by
returning them to their particular social contexts.
For every snapshot that is found and archived by the Picture Project, how-
ever, there are potentially hundreds more that are simply lost or abandoned.
Given the interdependence between snapshot photographs and the individual
and familial networks in which and for which they are created, it is puzzling
that these anonymous snapshots have become something of an art-world
superstar of late. Once the bailiwick of oddball,
Figure 1.
flea-market and junk-shop denizens, vintage
Untitled. Gelatin silver print, c.
snapshots have of late caught the eye of more 1930. Photographer unknown.
Collection of Robert E. Jackson.
high-profile collectors such as Thomas Walther
and Robert Flynn Johnson. The past decade has
also seen the emergence of a number of vernacular photography galleries,
both online and brick-and-mortar establishments. Perhaps the most promi-
nent aspect of this cultural trend, however, is the proliferation of museum
exhibitions devoted to the vintage snapshot. Within the past decade alone, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the International
Center for Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Bal-
timore Contemporary Museum, the Aldrich Contemporary Arts Museum,
and the Newark Museum have all mounted exhibitions of found snapshots
or personal vernacular photographic objects.2
In dramatic contrast to the public archives of the Picture Project, these
museum exhibits endeavor to establish a broad and often nationalistic cultural
relevance for the lowly anonymous snapshot, often framed simultaneously
through the rhetorics of aesthetics and cultural history. Moreover, the actual
images on display in these exhibitions have decidedly little in common with
the recovered snapshots of the Picture Project, still optimistically in search of
their owners. Despite the fact that the Picture Project photos are presented
online for public view, they cannot really be read in aesthetic or nationally
symbolic terms - they are still potentially claimable and therefore still belong

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 427

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428 I American Quarterly

somewhere, to someone, and not in a collectors vault or behind glass in a

museum. The snapshots exhibited at museums such as the Met and the SF-
MOMA, however, were presented to a larger audience as nostalgic traces of
a general past, representative slices of American life, and accidental works of
amateur art. In so doing, curators Douglas Nickel (SFMOMA), Mia Fineman
(the Met), and others sought to give this pervasive photographic genre its day
in the sun. Spurred by museum tributes to the photographic achievements
of everyday people, snapshot photography has begun to take its place in the
cultural and aesthetic history of the nation.
Or has it? Rumblings about the omission of snapshot photography (or ver-
nacular photography more broadly) from traditional histories of photography
have been audible within the academy for some time now. Geoffrey Batchen s
"Vernacular Photographies" was for many a call to arms in a battle to better
understand the depth and breadth of the photographic medium, but even
before the publication of Batchen s seminal essay, artists and scholars such as
Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Chalfen, Marianne Hirsch, Julia Hirsch, Patricia Hol-
land, Annette Kuhn, Michael Lesy, Lorie Novak, Allan Sekula, and Jo Spence
(to name just a few) have struggled to interpret the ubiquitous and banal but
deeply affecting culture of snapshot photography. This is, however, easier said
than done. The complexities of a vernacular image culture entrenched in both
public convention and private desires are too great to address here, but suf-
fice it to say that the images and practices that typify snapshot photography
are difficult to pin down. Because snapshot photography is almost always
produced for and circulated within the private realm, because its meaning
and significance are so imbedded in individual and rarely rational affective
responses, and because of the sheer volume and heterogeneity of images to
be taken into account, snapshot photography offers profound challenges to
almost any existing methodology for understanding visual culture. And in this
regard the institutional framework of the museum is no exception. Limited
in access and scope, structured by a discourse of aesthetics that rarely figures
into the production or consumption of everyday snapshots, and dedicated
to the public circulation of images that were conceived in overtly private and
subjective terms, the museum seems a particularly ill-suited venue for exploring
the everyday realities of snapshot photography. While museum exhibitions
have put a wide range of intriguing and enchanting vintage photographs on
display, the majority of recent snapshot museum exhibitions have revealed
little, if anything, about the social and affective function of this pervasive yet
surprisingly elusive image culture.

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 429

In this regard, the recent exhibition Accidental Mysteries (originally installed

at the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2005 and currently
touring to a number of different venues across the United States) follows the
dominant trend in snapshot museum exhibitions, albeit in a somewhat heavy-
handed vein. Drawn in its entirety from a single private collection (John and
Teenuh Fosters), the exhibition offers sixty-nine individual examples of the
vintage snapshot s potential for accidental but artful creativity. The majority
of these small images are reverently framed and hung, neatly spaced, across the
walls of the gallery. In contrast to the familiarity of paging through an album
or rifling through an envelope of drugstore prints, the installation encourages
contemplative distance. In an unusual move (though decidedly reminiscent
of Edward Steichens innovative installation for the blockbuster 1955 MoMA
exhibition "The Family of Man"), the collector also selected a handful of im-
ages to be digitally enlarged to poster size and mounted, frameless, on what
looked like Fome-cor or masonite board. But here again, the aim is aesthetic
detachment. By enlarging the minute, accidental detail into a monumental
compositional element, Foster s enlargements are designed to "call attention
to [the photographs'] inherent artistic qualities."3
Considered together, the photographs in Accidental Mysteries cohere
precisely because of their incoherence. Each image seems hand selected for its
incomprehensibility, but aside from this shared factor and the photos' status
as anonymous snapshots, little seems to unite these images thematically or
visually. A rigidly symmetrical frontal portrait, for example, depicts a man
(or woman) clad in a sailor suit and gas mask against a blank background. In
another image, an infant lies sleeping outdoors on a small baby blanket while
in the adjacent grass a snake (on second perusal a garden hose) and a long
dark shadow (probably the photographer s) create a palpable air of menace.
A third example would be a generic domestic family portrait - mother and
daughter seated in a wide, upholstered chair while father perches on the
arm, leaning casually but protectively toward wife and daughter - but for
a dramatic areola of white light that envelops the girls head and torso. The
source of these incongruities in the bulk of the images seems to be, as the
title suggests, accident: poor timing with the shutter, an unseen detail that
finds its way into the frame, a sudden burst of movement on the part of the
subject, and the occasional double exposure or lens flare. A smaller number
of the images seem to be intentional jokes on the part of the photographer,
but they are jokes whose punch lines are long forgotten. There are, finally,
a handful of images that are almost purely banal, as so many snapshots are,
but are saved by a fortunate though certainly unplanned resemblance to the

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430 I American Quarterly

work of art photographers such as Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, or
Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The connecting thread between these images, then,
lies in their only occasionally intentional desire to take familiar photographic
scenarios and make them strange. Moreover, this seems to be the motive of
the exhibition as a whole: to challenge our perceptions of the all-too-familiar
and mundane genre of snapshot photography with the whimsical, odd, and
occasionally grotesque "mysteries" of the Foster collection.
The mystification of snapshot photography in "Accidental Mysteries" is
made possible by the fact that all the photographs in the exhibition are now
anonymous. Indeed, part of what makes these images so strange is that, unlike
that vast majority of snapshot photographs (including those lost in natural
disasters like Hurricane Katrina), these photographs do not seem to belong
anywhere or to anyone. Without access to the original contexts of these images,
the identities of their subjects, the geographical details of their settings, even
the historical moments in which the images
Figure 2.
were taken are obscured. Yet the orphaned "Cold Modesty." Toned gelatin silver print,
status of these images is central for the col- September 6, 1909. Photographer unknown.
Collection of Robert E. Jackson.
lector or curator who seeks to adopt them
into the discourse of aesthetics. Curator
Olivia Lahs-Gonzalez and collector John Foster demonstrate this by filling
the void of concrete historical information with an abundance of their own
interpretive context. A series of headings on the walls categorizes the images
not by period, subject matter, or photographic process, but by abstract formal
taxonomies of "the fantastic," "posing," and "chance." Evocative titles such as
"evil and television," "surreal diver," and "facing up to god" seem designed to
remove the photographs ever further from whatever practical, social context
they might once have inhabited. Only in the absence of a particular history
are these images freed up to (or constrained by) the language of the modernist
photographic avant-garde. Light leaks in the camera backing become stud-
ies in abstract form. An unforeseen detail creates a neo-Dada masterpiece. A
cleverly constructed inside joke between photographer and subject evokes
the serendipitous juxtapositions of Garry Winogrands street photography.
Yet these affinities, to analogize James Cliffords critique of the 1984 MoMA
"Primitivism" show, do not elucidate the culture of snapshot photography
any more than Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror broadens our understanding of
Kwakiutl masks.4 In short, as enchanting as these images may be in all their
lyrical whimsy, exhibitions such as "Accidental Mysteries" have very little to
tell us about the dynamic, personal, complex, and often chaotic culture of
snapshot photography.

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 431

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432 I American Quarterly

This failing on the part of "Accidental Mysteries" (and many other exhibi-
tions like it) is precisely what makes the National Gallery of Art s "The Art of
the American Snapshot" (2007) such an interesting addition to the wave of
recent vernacular photography exhibitions. As the name suggests, the cura-
tors of "The Art of the American Snapshot" do not stifle the urge to distill
from the photographs in the exhibition a modernist "snapshot aesthetic."
Like so many shows before it, "The Art of the American Snapshot" presents
the snapshot with all the trappings of fine art exhibition: careful lighting,
spare and elegant mats and frames, and, amusingly, a severe-looking security
guard reminding visitors that "no photography is allowed in the gallery." And
though it is far grander in scale than "Accidental Mysteries", "The Art of the
American Snapshot" is similarly engaged with the kinds of images one would
be unlikely to find in his or her own family album. Indeed, and it bears stating
the obvious here, the photographs found by snapshot collectors have often
been discarded by their owners, presumably for a reason. Thus, assuming that
one keeps the "good" snapshots and tosses the rest, we might comfortably
postulate that the photographs in almost any of the recent museum snapshot
exhibitions are precisely the inverse of the representative snapshots that inhabit
cherished family albums and archives across the United States. Little wonder,
then, that these American snapshots seem strange. They have been carefully
unselected by their makers as photographs that, for one reason or another, did
not conform to expectations. To a certain extent, then, the images in "The
Art of the American Snapshot" constitute yet another collection of quirky
and unusual found images offering imaginative and nostalgic visual pleasure
in the absence of a concrete social history.
However, if the collection on view in "The Art of the American Snap-
shot" prompts questions of "what were they thinking?" and "why was this
photograph taken?" the curators of this show (Sarah Greenough and Diane
Waggoner) take a determined stab at answering them. John Kouwenhoven has
defined vernacular culture as "the unself-conscious efforts of common people
... to create satisfying patterns out of the elements of a new and culturally
unassimilated environment."5 Greenough and Waggoner seem to engage
this concept of the vernacular head on, seeking not isolated phenomena, but
patterns, motifs, and rituals that emerge from the practical conditions and
desires of untrained photographers in the modern world. In this endeavor
they have two factors working in their favor. The first is that "The Art of the
American Snapshot" is a large exhibition. In contrast to the majority of such
exhibitions, Greenough and Waggoner have the room here to really delve into
a large collection of images. They emerge having identified certain recurring

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 433

themes and tropes. Instead of isolating and fetishizing singular examples of

these tropes, as was the norm, for example, in the Met's "Other Pictures:
Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection" (2001), the
National Gallery curators make a pronounced effort to repeat these motifs,
thus establishing them as conventional and, in some cases, the result of very
practical technological and cultural concerns on the part of photographers
and subjects. The menacing shadow of the photographer, to take one example,
stretching up from the base of the frame, often snaking its way across the body
of the subject, makes a frequent appearance in vintage snapshot exhibitions. To
some, it may be evidence of a puzzling lack of visual awareness on the part of
the photographer. For others, it may recall Lee Freidlander s playful use of his
own shadow in his clever meditations on the photographic self-portrait. But
instead of leaving these images provocatively silent, or pointing to particular
art historical affinities, "The Art of the American Snapshot" gives the visitor
a very practical explanation - that early photographic manuals instructed
photographers to photograph on a bright day facing away from the sun - and
backs this explanation up with a variety of demonstrative examples. Similarly
examined are the convention of posing an infant for a "solo" portrait by plac-
ing him in the lap of a parent obscured by a rug or a sheet and the recurring
visual pun on the phrase "breaking the news" effected by posing with one s
head thrust through a sheet of newsprint.
The curators also address conventions of collection and display by includ-
ing a variety of album pages (many carefully and cleverly captioned) and
snapshots that have been written on, drawn on, or composed into collages.
In a few instances they even offer sequences of images from the same pho-
tographer or family: a series of photographs of a nameless boy taken every
year on his birthday (April 14) from age nine to age fifteen, for example, or
an album page filled with Kodak No. 1 prints from "Mr. & M Weld s picnic
to Monument Club House." In so doing, the curators make the important
point that snapshots rarely occur in a void. Their legibility depends not only
on understanding social and visual conventions of the day, but also on the
basic narrative progression of images in an album and often the owners literal
inscription of an image through handwritten captions. In contrast to earlier
exhibitions that made a point of separating the image from its historical and
cultural moment, its technological limitations, and the carefully constructed
context of the album page or narrative photographic sequence, Greenough
and Waggoner take pains to qualify and quantify the photographic conven-
tions on display. They thus remind the viewer that no matter how odd or
foreign these images may look to us today, what we see is not the result of a

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434 I American Quarterly

bolt of creative inspiration from out of the blue, but the visual vernacular of
everyday people negotiating a new photographic technology in a particular
cultural moment.
The second tool in the curators' employ is a significant exhibition catalog,
which offers not only an impressive number of reproductions, but also four
substantive and well-researched essays that, together, trace a history of the
snapshot from its emergence with the Kodak No. 1 camera (in 1888) to a
year that is presumably at least within the lifetime of a significant portion
of the audience: 1978. Breaking that history into chunks of two or three
decades each, the essayists (in chronological order: Waggoner, Sarah Kennel,
Greenough, and Matthew Witkowsky) consider the snapshot in relation to
the technology, mass culture, political climate, and social conventions of
various periods in American history. In this way they divine, for example, a
turn toward sentimentality and the domestic realm in snapshots produced
during the First World War, a photographic preoccupation with speed and
spontaneity brought on by a combination of faster film technology and the
new mobility of the automobile, and an emerging sexual exhibitionism in
the snapshots of the 1950s that paralleled the rise of seductive Hollywood
stars such as Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. While "The Art of the
American Snapshot" is certainly not the first such historical consideration of
the snapshot,6 it is perhaps the most complete and the most in-depth to date.
Eschewing the technological determinism that has structured many histories
of photography and the rhetoric of innocence and instinct that often obscures
the more pedestrian influences of advertising and the popular press on everyday
photographers, the curators and authors of "The Art of the American Snap-
shot" seek to ground snapshot photography within a nexus of social, cultural,
political, and economic forces that, in turn, reveal themselves in subtle ways
through the images on the walls of the National Gallery.
And I wish I could say that they have succeeded, but they have not entirely.
On the one hand, and not to sell this project short, the careful history of
cultural influences and social trends presented in "The Art of the American
Snapshot" offers a refreshing tonic to the notion of momentary genius and
the paradox of anonymous aesthetic agency predominant in the rhetoric of
so many previous shows. At the same time, however, there is a sense in which
the urge to explain and understand this heterogeneous visual culture is too
strong, leading to oversimplification, a desire to surpass the chaotic nature of
a body of photography made by potentially millions of different anonymous
photographers by examining them through the frame of American cultural
history. Essayists struggle to fit photographs neatly into broad historical cat-

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 435

egories like the "culture of abundance" that Warren Sussman located in the
1920s or the "Picture Age" of the 1950s. In the end, the chaos and banality of
the snapshot win out. Indeed, in the final essay, "When the Earth was Square:
1960-1978," Matthew Witkowsky acknowledges as much. After laying out
certain technological, cultural, and political touchstones of the period - the
Vietnam War, the Polaroid SX-70, the televised Watergate hearings, the Za-
p ruder film - he goes on to state flatly that "these and other grand themes of
American culture do not leap out' of the pictures reproduced in these pages
. . . Limitations thus become evident in the use of such pictures to construct
a History, whether of American society or American snapshots."7 His project
thus declared impossible, Witkowsky goes on to abandon snapshot photog-
raphy almost entirely, devoting the rest of his essay primarily to the use of
snapshot-esque banality and accident in the work of photographers such as
William Eggleston and Diane Arbus and conceptual artists such as Ed Ruscha
and Dan Graham.
Witkowsky s puzzling resistance to considering vernacular snapshot pho-
tography from the 1 960s and '70s in the same historical depth as his fellow
essayists consider earlier periods leads to a larger question about the decision
to end the show in 1978. Why 1978? Where are the snapshots from the
1980s and '90s? Where are the discussions of the short-lived disc camera and
the lens distortion and poorly aimed flash of the plastic disposable camera?
What kinds of parallels might we draw between vernacular photography
and the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan years, the rise of the music
video and twenty-four-hour cable news, the vogue for neon, shoulder pads,
and grunge rock? Certainly just as many photographs were made in these
last years before the snapshot began its profound shift from silver-based film
and prints to more ephemeral digital media. Why don't these images merit
consideration as part of "The Art of the American Snapshot"? I think the
answer has something to do with the narrative presented by the exhibition
and the catalog as a whole. The images on the walls are all drawn from a single
collection, and as much as curators may emphasize the historical framing
of the show, the aesthetic sensibilities of the collector Robert E. Jackson are
evident throughout. Greenough makes no bones about this; as she states in
the catalog introduction: "The National Gallery of Art is not in the habit of
celebrating bad works of art, and the photographs included in this . . . exhibi-
tion are, like all other works presented in this museum, worthy of aesthetic
consideration."8 It comes as no surprise, then, that the narrative presented
as one flips through the catalog or wanders from room to room (and decade
to decade) in the National Gallery show is one of parallel developments in
photographic convention and aesthetic innovation.

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436 I American Quarterly

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 437

The story begins, of course, with the all-important invention of the Kodak
No. 1 box camera, the moment when the technological agency to make pho-
tographs is placed in the hands of everyday Americans, and follows a period
of great and lively experimentation with that new medium. In the process,
photographic norms are established and reinforced in concert with cultural
trends, technological developments, and Kodak advertising campaigns. But
looking back to these early years, the exhibition suggests, we can still marvel
at the vernacular ingenuity of trailblazing photographers and the bizarre and
inventive possibilities pioneered by untrained new camera owners. Regard-
less of the external influences that may have contributed significantly to the
development of amateur photographic styles, these early years are character-
ized by both wall text and catalog essays as an era of profound innocence,
honesty, and sincerity. By the end of the exhibition and the catalog, however,
that spark of visual interest the curators locate in this vernacular image culture
seems to have faded significantly. What was once an unmediated glimpse
into the truth of the past has calcified into a banal and cagy self-awareness
bordering on vulgarity. Tied to a growing mass
Figure 3.
media and snowballing consumer culture, the
Untitled. Hand-colored gelatin silver
print, 1940s. Photographer unknown. photographs from the latter half of the century
Collection of Robert E. Jackson.
are characterized by and, indeed, selected for
their increasingly narcissistic qualities. By the
final decades of the exhibition, the viewer is treated to glimpses of a man play-
fully pointing a (toy?) gun at a small child's head, a grandmotherly woman
posing with a birthday cake by proffering her middle finger, and an elderly
couple making out on a living-room sofa, a bottle of whisky clutched in the
woman's hand. In these selections, the curators seem to suggest a turn away
from the inherent truth of the image to a garish artificiality and cynicism, one
echoed in the shift from nostalgic black and white to the hypersaturated hues
of Kodachrome. While these visual phenomena certainly gel with aspects of
postwar American culture, this shift is tied problematically to a tapering off
of vernacular aesthetic potential. Witkowsky s tacit dismissal of the vernacular
in favor of fine art photography suggests a radical diverging of paths. What
was once a dynamic arena for vernacular experimentation informing and
engaging an emerging modernist photographic aesthetic has, in the postwar
years, sedimented into banal uniformity, leaving artists to make the bold new
strides in aesthetic development while amateurs make the kinds of formulaic
family pictures we still make today.
Perhaps we need to question, however, whether this divergence is the re-
sult of an atrophying of vernacular ingenuity or just our inability to distance

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438 I American Quarterly

ourselves from more recent developments in photographic convention. Early

twentieth century photographic practices seem novel and creative by contem-
porary standards; tinged with an air of the antique, the earlier photographs in
this exhibition are celebrated for their inherent innocence and their abstract
"truth" to human experience. Yet no matter how interesting the vernacular
photographic conventions of the 1980s may be, the images that represent them
lack a certain nostalgic and aesthetic detachment. The more recent the image,
the more prone it is to evoke specific memories of ones own not-too-distant
and far-more-complicated past, bringing to mind visions of our younger selves
wearing braces on our teeth or too-tight pants, sporting then-trendy but now
ridiculous hairstyles, and embodying a naivete that seems blind in older and
wiser hindsight. These more familiar images are equally, if not even more, a
part of the story of what snapshot photography represents to the individual
and to U.S. culture in general. Yet even in the context of an exhibition such
as this one, which dedicates itself to creating not a formal study but a social
history of snapshot photography, to include recent photographs might lift the
veil of accident and mystery a bit too abruptly, taking the viewer from charm-
ing glimpses of the abstract past to something unsettlingly familiar, private,
and too close for comfort in the public space of the museum.
It must be said, however, that there are a few key instances in "The Art of
the American Snapshot" in which a more complex and less one-dimensionally
rosy vision of snapshot photography emerges. In these moments, the viewer is
given a sense of snapshot photography's formulaic conventionality as well as
the weird and even unsettling impulses that often underpin it. Perhaps most
striking in this regard is a series of forty-eight snapshots made by Flo (last
name unknown) from Milwaukee. Though information on Flo is limited, she
is notably the only named photographer in the show, and through her album
of photographs, the curators have pieced together a rudimentary biography of
an unmarried woman who worked for IBM and lived in a YWCA dormitory.
Almost every one of the images from Flo's album presents a woman alone, and
in almost every case, the subject looks unprepared for, if not openly resistant
to having her photograph taken. Women stare startled into the lens. A few lift
a hand to instinctively groom their hair for the photo-op, but Flo refuses her
subjects those few seconds of composure and shoots the picture straightaway.
Some appear to have been ambushed in the midst of domestic tasks such as
washing their hair in the sink or fishing for something that fell behind the
sofa. Still others appear openly hostile, shooting a dirty look at the camera,
or slamming a door in the photographer's face. The exhibition presents this
interesting collection of photographs and the individual history that emerges

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 439

from it as a kind of representative (if somewhat disaffected) slice of everyday

life from the late 1950s - one that reveals both normative domestic aspirations
and their frequent untenability. Greenoughs catalog essay even goes so far as
to construct a fictional biographical sketch of the woman, from her shyness
around men and her dreams of "Ozzie and Harriet" domesticity, to her attitude
toward icons of a 1950s consumerism such as Mr. Clean and the Jolly Green
Giant. But what struck me immediately about the images from Flo s album
is how unsuccessful they are as snapshots. Flo tries to use the conventions of
snapshot photography to coalesce her unmarried housemates and co-workers
into a kind of surrogate family or community. But in almost every frame, she
struggles with unwilling subjects who seem to know better than to treat their
relationship to her as a legitimate photo-opportunity. What Flo s photographs
really capture is the way that the social conventions of snapshot photography,
as a mode of signifying important moments and a tool for social connectivity,
have failed her utterly. Rather than providing a fantasy of sorority through
an album of smiling housemates and co-workers, Flos snapshots reiterate her
social isolation and ineptitude. Here, too, then, we have a glimpse of "truth"
but of a very different kind. Though many take photographs to construct
communal identities and form interpersonal bonds, the social ritual of snap-
shot photography privileges some and not others. As Flo s photographs reveal,
snapshots present the ideal of middle-class, heterosexual, married family life,
but only for those who have already achieved it.
Undoubtedly one of the reasons that old snapshot photographs have at-
tained a new cultural cachet is that in the age of digital technology, the "analog"
or silver-based photograph has become something of a dinosaur. While the age
of digital photography has certainly not put an end to the practice of family
photography (and if anything, it seems to have accelerated our cultural desire
to record everyday events with the camera), it has transformed the snapshot
image into something that is more ephemeral and immaterial. Where once
the photographic mistake was indelibly preserved on the roll of film, printed,
and often saved as a parenthetical "oops" alongside the more flattering and
representative images from the same roll, the digital camera allows people
to fine-tune their snapshooting abilities as they go, noting the uneven light-
ing, the distracting detail, or the ill-timed blink, erasing the imperfect shot,
and giving the photo-op a second go. Moreover, once the perfected image is
taken, it is as often posted online or sent in an e-mail as it is printed up to be
preserved as a physical artifact. Indeed, as the archivists at The Picture Project
would certainly agree, today, the digital archive is the far more reliable form of
preserving family history. The constantly evolving nature of digital technology

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440 I American Quarterly

notwithstanding, the everyday family photograph that is saved on a computer

hard drive and backed up on CD is much more likely to weather a storm (and
thus preserve a history) than a box of old photographs.
This distinction between the old, dog-eared and deckle-edged scrap of
photographic paper and the durable digital archive is certainly central to the
recent museumification of the snapshot. An ingrained nostalgia for low-fi
technologies - chunky box cameras, paper roll film, switch-pull shutter re-
leases - reinforces readings of early amateur photography as simple, direct, and
unmediated. As technology and image culture as a whole become more perva-
sive and more sophisticated, these exhibitions suggest, something profound,
poignant, and indeed "human" is lost. But the time spans of shows such as
"Accidental Mysteries" and "The Art of the American Snapshot" also suggest
that the intrigue and interest of snapshot photography as an aesthetic object
had already begun to die out, even before the advent of digital technology.
It is arguably less the advent of the ephemeral digital snapshot and more the
proximity of any snapshot to our own experiences and memories that makes its
presence in the museum problematic. Yet it is also the photographs ability to
provoke our own insecurities and instincts to normative self-presentation that
lies at the heart of our cultural obsession with image making. To obscure this
aspect of snapshot photography with the soft focus of nostalgia is to tell only
half the story. While "The Art of the American Snapshot" makes an important
first step toward unpacking these cultural complexities, we need to go further
still. Or perhaps we need to question the historical value of exhibitions such
as these across the board. Though these exhibits certainly provide an escapist
pleasure for the viewer and a surprising element of whimsy and humor within
the traditionally staid space of the modern art museum, ultimately the culture
of vernacular photography in all of its messy diversity may beg for a better
understanding than a museum exhibition can provide.

Notes
1. The Picture Project, "About the Project," http://www.pictureproject.org/PpicU2 (accessed January
29, 2008).
2. I allude here to the exhibition "Forget Me Not" at the ICP in New York City (2005). This exhibition,
curated by Geoffrey Batchen, focused specifically on photographs (some of them snapshots and some
professionally made portraits or postcard images) that were embellished with the addition of flowers,
mementos, and other decorative elements and incorporated into domestic objects. While Batchens
show was distinct from exhibitions I will be discussing here, it nevertheless seems to be part of a larger
movement to investigate (and legitimize) vernacular photographic culture by placing it in a museum
setting.

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 Exhibiting Snapshot Photography I 441

3. John Fosters collectors statement in Accidental Mysteries: Extraordinary Vernacular Photographs from
the Collection of John and Teenuh Foster (St. Louis: Sheldon Art Galleries, 2006).
4. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
5. John Kouwenhoven, Arts in Modern American Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948), 13.
6. Previous texts in this vein include Douglas Nickel, Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888
to the Present (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998); Nancy Martha West,
Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Brian Coe and
Paul Gates, The Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography (London: Ash & Grant, 1977);
and Colin Ford and Karl Steinworth, eds., You Press the Button, We Do the Rest: The Birth of Snapshot
Photography (London: Dirk Nishen, 1988).
7. Matthew Witkowsky, "When the Earth Was Square: 1 960-1 978," The Art of the American Snapshot,
1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art,
with Princeton University Press, 2007), 233.
8. Sarah Greenough, introduction to The Art of the American Snapshot, 2.

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