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Article Excerpt
In a seminal essay titled "Vernacular Photographies," first published in 2000, the photography scholar Geoffrey Batchen calls for us to "restore photography to its own history." (1) Too often, photography has been the square peg forced into the round hole of an art-historical discourse grounded in painting, its visual structures and aesthetics. To better understand photography as an idea, a visual medium, and a concrete visual practice on its own terms, we need to better interrogate the breadth and complexity of the visual objects we call photographs. In particular, Batchen calls attention to the pervasive but remarkably understudied category of photography he describes as "ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought ... by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy." (2) Encompassing a heterogeneous mix of picture postcards, photographically embellished jewelry and domestic objects, inexpensive ambrotype and tintype portraits, and, of course, billions of common, amateur snapshots, this "troublesome" and "abject" corpus of vernacular imagery represents a blind spot in studies of photography. On the one hand, it is both too ubiquitous and too banal to be understood within the rarefying context of fine art. Indeed, because it is valued and defined in primarily sentimental terms, vernacular photography seems, at times, to resist critical intellectual scrutiny entirely. Yet at the same time, as that which is repressed in photography's official histories, vernacular photography gives us insight into how photographic aesthetics are constructed and what has been excluded in the process. By admitting this chaotic and often crude body of images into the photographic canon or, better yet, as Batchen suggests, by seeing vernacular photography as "the organizing principle of photography's history in general," we stand to gain a far richer and more nuanced understanding of photography as an aesthetic medium, an historical document, and a dynamic social practice. (3)
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But this begs the question: what exactly might such a vernacular history look like? Two years prior to the publication of Batchen's essay, the project of putting vernacular photography under the lens of historical and aesthetic scrutiny may have already begun. In the summer of 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) presented Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, an exhibition devoted, as the title suggests, to precisely the kinds of ordinary photographs that, according to Batchen, rarely preoccupy the museum or the academy. The temporal span of the show ranged from the year the Kodak No. 1 snapshot camera was first introduced to, if not quite the actual present, then at least a somewhat recent past (sometime in the 1980s), proximate enough to recall moments in the visitor's lifetime, yet distant enough to maintain a nostalgic sense of the "good old days." The photographs in the show were all "snapshots" in the traditional sense, albeit in a decidedly quirky vein. Made by amateur photographers with inexpensive cameras, they depicted conventional subjects: friends and family, holidays and birthdays, vacations, leisure activities, and family pets. Most of the photographs were black and white. The few in color bore the characteristic oversaturated hues and square frame of the now-outmoded chromogenic development print. With their wealth of particular visual detail, the images selected for the Snapshots exhibition offered concrete historical insight into not only the character of American domestic life over the past century, but also the technology, visual conventions, and social customs of snapshot photography itself. Indeed, Snapshots was part of what SFMoMA's deputy director for curatorial affairs Lori Fogarty described as "a programmatic effort ... to investigate the medium of photography comprehensively as a critical part of visual culture." (4) Following on the heels of two other vernacular-photography exhibitions at SFMoMA, Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present (1996) and Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence (1997), Snapshots presented an array of illustrative examples of the snapshot to be considered within the context of that genre, as American cultural artifacts. Complemented by the curator Douglas Nickel's catalogue essay, a thorough historical survey of the snapshot's key technological, cultural, and commercial influences, Snapshots could be seen as a promising first step toward the recuperation of a lost history of vernacular photography.
Yet one must also consider the relation of the vernacular photographic culture in this exhibition to the institutional framework of SFMoMA. It was notably the first museum on the West Coast of the United States dedicated solely to exhibiting modern art and has, over the past seventy years, amassed a significant permanent collection of fine-art photography. Thus, like the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), though to a somewhat lesser extent, SFMoMA can be seen as one of the key American institutions involved in establishing and defining the aesthetic parameters of photography as a legitimate fine art. (5) Through its collection and exhibition practices, SFMoMA has sanctioned and helped to promote the careers of photographic masters like Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Imogen Cunningham. Within this institutional context, one cannot help but see the images in the Snapshots exhibition, as well, through the lens of modernist aesthetics. Certainly the photographs in the exhibition bore out this interpretation. With a penchant for strange visual details, puzzling scenarios, and artful compositional elements, Nickel's selection of photographs defied the characteristic banality associated with the snapshot genre and emphasized just how unique and artful this amateur form of photography might be. Within the galleries of SFMoMA, playful experimentation, whimsy, and visual accident prevailed, evoking for curators and critics a serendipitous artistry, and legitimating vernacular photography's place within the museum. (6)
But once aestheticized, what can the found, vintage snapshot really tell us about the vernacular culture of photography? The designation of the snapshot as art in a museum context may valorize an underappreciated genre, but it also neutralizes the affective and even political possibilities of bringing this popular, vernacular-image culture into a public sphere of reception. As a genre, snapshot photography is intrinsically tied to normative social conventions. To take a photograph of a child on her birthday is not only a gesture of love and intimacy, but also a subscription to social mores and the family-oriented value system they represent. Moreover, other, more unconventional kinds of snapshots may offer a provocative alternative to the social normativity and visual banality so often associated with snapshot culture, opening doors to new modes of self-fashioning and social relations. Any truly vernacular history of photography must take this social life of the snapshot into account. But the museum, as Svetlana Alpers has argued, constitutes its own "way of seeing," an "attentive" mode of looking that supersedes the object's potential social function. Indeed, the aesthetic framing--both literal and metaphorical--that situates the snapshot within the "discursive space" of the museum produces something akin to what Rosalind Krauss has termed an incoherence, a visible disjuncture between the photograph's contingent social meaning--and here we might recall Batchen's desire to "restore photography to its own history"--and its designation as art. (7) By concentrating on composition and form in the absence of the particular histories that tether the snapshot to a "real world" of social interaction and individual affective response, Snapshots elevated snapshot photography to the level of fine art only to undercut its cultural role as an emotional, reproducible, indexical, and highly personal genre of visual culture. Thus despite the seemingly egalitarian motives of Snapshots, this show and others like it ultimately revitalize the modernist opposition between high art and vernacular culture and raise new questions about the role of photography in the modern museum.
This essay will explore what I believe continues to be a contentious relationship between photography's vernacular culture and the aestheticizing function of the museum. First articulated in the postmodern critiques of scholars like Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Christopher Phillips, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, the issue of whether the photograph--an image that always refers to something else--can sit comfortably within the hermetic aesthetic space of the modern museum gallery seems newly relevant. (8) The recent vogue of exhibiting vernacular photography specifically in art museums (as opposed to libraries or historical societies) offers a particularly dramatic example of a utilitarian visual culture utterly at odds with the rhetorical framework in which it is made public and visible. (9) How then, has the snapshot become the "found object" of the moment? How is it mediated and reinterpreted by the discursive space of the museum? To answer these questions, I will explore the discursive framing of two recent snapshot exhibitions in major American museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection (2000) and the J. Paul Getty Museum's Close to Home: An American Album (2004). I choose these particular exhibitions because they represent two key threads in aesthetic and curatorial approaches to vernacular (and specifically snapshot) photography. The Metropolitan Museum set out to transform the snapshot into an accidental masterpiece, suitable for framing and exhibition alongside the other great works of painting, sculpture, and architecture that comprise its world-famous collection. The Getty took an avowedly more populist approach, attempting to bring the museum to the everyday photographer by embracing the vernacularity of the snapshot, its sentimentality, and its function as a touchstone for personal narrative. Both exhibitions, then, sought to bridge the gap between fine art and...
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