LONESOME by JOEL ROTENBERG

Snapshot people tend to get interested in genres and categories and restrict their collecting habits accordingly. Most of the entries in this blog focus on one or another such aspect of the larger enterprise.

But art is all about feeling, photography is all about feeling, and snapshots are all about feeling. What else could they be about? Nobody’s been talking about that.

“Feeling” can be a subtle thing. Let’s not be subtle. Here I’ve tried to use snapshots to nail one simple and very specific feeling that I happen to like. The snapshooters didn’t put it there. So who did?

The idea that a composition or other formal feature might be unintended is easy to understand: with billions of snapshots, there’s going to be a measurable number of such accidents. It’s a little harder to see how a feeling (one people agree about) could be unintentional.

The key is that when a snapshot “has” a feeling for us, that feeling arises not just from its subject but, crucially, from its formal properties, which can in turn be unintentional—or at least due to some original nonexpressive purpose we can only guess at. For instance, consider the subject’s interesting remoteness from the camera in most of my examples—its “lostness” within the frame. If this wasn’t a complete accident, it might conceivably have come about in some cases because the photographer was hoping to catch the subject unawares, or just thought it was a good idea to include the subject’s surroundings in the shot. But we read it quite differently. The feeling we pick up (and can’t help picking up) comes from formal properties that almost certainly weren’t intended to carry it—properties that, before these pictures got yanked out of their original context, didn’t carry it. 

Now that is a strange state of affairs. Nobody created the feeling. However, I took it from there. Part of what snapshot collectors notice, choose, and assemble has to do with emotional tone. Here I’ve drawn attention to one such tone (which might not have been that striking in any one picture) by bringing together a lot of examples of it.

And, more broadly, I’m also trying to draw attention to this aspect of what snapshot collectors do, or can do. Artists who use found objects are usually interested in something about the look of them (as opposed to the mere fact of them). Duchamp’s original readymades are a good example—their elegance is part of the joke. But snapshots, which are found objects of a kind, have not just a found look, but a found emotional tone. Does any other kind of found object give you that to play with? I don’t think so.

For more information on Joel Rotenberg, and other guest bloggers, click here. 

FOR BETTER OR WORSE by STACY WALDMAN

Did they have happy lives together or did they feel trapped?   Here, some share a joke and others appear stern, à la American Gothic.    We'll never know what their lives were like, but we can imagine.

FOUR SHOWS ON THE EAST COAST WHERE YOU CAN COME BUY PHOTOS IN PERSON

Below are four shows where I'll be setting up in the next few months.    Other Photos dealers that you may see at one or more of these shows are: Erin Waters, David Chow, Stu Butterfield, Glenn Vogel, Thomas Harris, Richie Hart, etc.  Hope to see/meet you there:

1.  DC Antique Photo Show, Sunday, March 13th antiquephotoshow.com 

 2.  NYC Photo Show, Saturday, March 19th usphotoshows.com

3.  Allentown, PA  Paper Show - Saturday, April 30th and Sunday, May 1st. www.allentownpapershow.com

 

4. Boston Book & Paper Expo, Saturday, May 7th www.bookandpaperexpo.com

JUST A BUNCH OF PEOPLE STANDING AROUND by JOEL ROTENBERG

 

Not much to see here but a lucky arrangement of otherwise uninteresting elements.

In his recent post, Robert Jackson mentions the psychological resonance that double exposures can have: as with classical surrealist disjunctive imagery, the viewer can’t help trying to relate the component images.

The snapshots shown above are simpler. Though what I am about to say is far from completely true of all my examples, ideally this class of picture has no psychological resonance at all, no mystery, nothing to make you think, no thematic content—none of that stuff that other kinds of photos have. And they’re not freaky; they don’t bomb you with strangeness. So what’s left? I chose them because they’re little more than accidental compositions. I tried to get rid of everything else. If they have a subject, we’d have to say they’re about accident itself—about what’s at the heart of the snapshot. These are snapshots purged of everything irrelevant, stripped down to what is snapshottiest. From a certain point of view I think they are about as pure as snapshots can be.

Though so mundane that they are essentially empty, at the same time they are as statistically improbable as any good snapshot. Cases differ, but in a general sort of way we might say that what is most fortunate in a good double exposure is the choice of the two superimposed images; their precise registration is less important. But an accidental composition is all about precision. A fraction of a millimeter’s change in the position of the elements could very often destroy it.

Click here to find out more about Joel Rotenberg

THE DOUBLE-EXPOSURE by ROBERT E. JACKSON

 

A photographic double-exposure is created when the same piece of film is exposed twice, such that two images are superimposed on top of each other.   This often occurs because of a mistake in the manual winding of film to the next frame.  As found in the snapshot, the result can be the creation of an amazing piece of unintentional genius which is viewed as an artistic achievement by many collectors.   But the double-exposure, accidently created via the mechanics of taking a photo, is more often than not removed from any real artistic inclination on the part of the photographer.  It is not related to what the photographer saw, but rather to what the camera saw.  In other words, the photographer took the photo (or photos), but the camera made the resulting double image.  And yet it is the snapshot collector who provides the final stamp of approval that the mechanical “mistake” is worthy of being sought after, bought, and elevated to a proud place in his or her collection.  Of course the mere fact that the photograph still exists is due to some sort of selection process in which the snapshooter engaged—that is the decision to keep the photo instead of throwing it away. However, one should be cautious about giving the original owner of the photo too much credit.

In any case, these mysterious and enigmatic photos thankfully remain to be appreciated and read as strange photographic hieroglyphics-the viewer having often to visually decode the piece in an attempt to appreciate it as more than the sum of its parts.   The viewer sees in the double-exposure what is desired to be seen.  The result is a more personal and subjective response to the visual information provided within the photo than is often found within the straightforward narrative of the snapshot.  Thus, in my mind, the double-exposure has the distinction of being the rarest and most visually complex image found within snapshots.

But outside of a small group of passionate collectors, there is not much critical interest in this snapshot genre.  Museum curators, while they might like the images personally, are not really ready to devote much wall space exclusively to the images; and academics are not inclined to devote much critical thought to the subject of double-exposures.  This is because the images were created by a mechanical failure of a machine and as such are immune to some visual or historical context in which the curator or academic can place them.  The double-exposure image is an accident, pure and simple (and one has to be careful to distinguish a double-exposure from a trick photo where there was true intent by the photographer involved).  You cannot compare such photos to imagery which the photographer might have seen and thus imply that they are historically relevant in some manner.  These photos don’t have a sociological basis for their creation.  They aren’t tied to some cultural influence.  They don’t speak to the emergence of an awakening of creativity and empowerment related to gender identity or sexual preference. They didn’t happen as a response to the emergence of the American Dream and the economic impulses to document wealth or status.   In sum, they exist apart from history itself.  Yes, they might resonate via the accidental strains found in the art of Surrealism and Dadaism and the shifting planes of imagery as seen in Cubism and photocollage, but such visual precedents perhaps only account for why the double- exposure has been saved and appreciated.  It doesn’t explain why they exist and can be so haunting and compelling.  Thus they provide the community of academics and museum curators with a problem related to artistic intent and influence.  They are pure imagery in its most basic form.  And they can be unlike anything found in the photographic world.

For more on Robert E. Jackson, click here.