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Ordinary Pictures and Accidental Masterpieces:Snapshot Photography in the Modern Art MuseumCatherine ZuromskisPublished online: 03 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Catherine Zuromskis (2008) Ordinary Pictures and Accidental Masterpieces: Snapshot Photography inthe Modern Art Museum, Art Journal, 67:2, 104-125, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2008.10791307

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Unknown Photographer, Untitled ("YoungGirl at Beach"), 19305,gelatin silver print.Collection of SanFrancisco Museum of ModernArt, gift of SusanBurks

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Ordinary Pictures and

Accidental Masterpieces:

Snapshot Photography in theModern Art Museum

Catherine Zuromskis

Iwould like to thank to ElizaKozlowski at theGeorge Eastman House and Edie Wu and PaulMartineau at the J. Paul Getty Museum for provid­ing me with extensive press materials and walltext for Picturing What Matters and Close to Home.

I. Geoffrey Batchen, "Vernacular Photographies,"in Each WifdIdea: Writing, Photography, History(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 200 I), 57-81.2. Ibid., 57.3. Ibid., 59.

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." I 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 under­

studied 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"?

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 photog­

raphy 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 understand­

ing of photography as an aesthetic medium, an historical document, and a

dynamic social practice. 3

But this begs the question: what exactly might such a vernacular history look

like? Two years prior to the publication of Batcheri'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 ofEveryday Life, 1888 to thePresent, an

exhibition devoted, as the title suggests, to precisely the kinds of ordinary pho­

tographs 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 pho­

tographers 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 charac­

teristic oversaturated hues and square frame of the now-outmoded chromogenic

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4. Lori Fogarty, foreword to Douglas R. Nickel,Snapshots: ThePhotography of Everyday Ufe f888to the Present (San Francisco: San FranciscoMuseum of Modern Art, 1988), 7.5. The complex role of MoMA in defining andpromoting photography as a fine art has beendefinitivelychronicled and critiqued in ChristopherPhillips, ''The Judgment Seat of Photography,"October 22 (Fall 1982): 27-63.6. The SFMoMAexhibition overview calls theimages in the show "untutored, unintended 'mas­terpieces'" and, according to the SanFranciscoChronicle critic Kenneth Baker, "Snopshots showshow small a part conscious intention may playin what makes art fascinating." San FranciscoMuseum of Modern Art, exhibition overview,online at www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail/98_exhib_snapshots.html; Kenneth Baker,"Found Photographic Art Captured in SFMoMA's'Snapshots," SanFrancisco Chronicle, May 27,1998, EI.

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 ofAmerican 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 theFrontier: Photographs of theDevelopingWest, 1849 to thePresent (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 techno­

logical, 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 cul­

ture 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 defin­

ing the aesthetic parameters of photography as a legitimate fine art.! Through its

collection and exhibition practices, SFMoMA has sanctioned and helped to pro­

mote 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 aes­

thetics. Certainly the photographs in the exhibition bore out this interpretation.

With a penchant for strange visual details, puzzling scenarios, and artful compo­

sitional 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, evok­

ing for curators and critics a serendipitous artistry, and legitimating vernacular

photography's place within the museum.f

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 pho­

tograph 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 asso­

ciated 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

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7. Svetlana Alpers. "The Museum as a Way ofSeeing." in Exhibiting Cultures: ThePoetics andPolitics ofMuseum Display. ed. Ivan Karp andSteven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: SmithsonianInstitution Press. 1991). 26-27; Rosalind Krauss."Photography's Discursive Spaces." in TheContestofMeaning: Critical Histories of Photography. ed.Richard Bolton (Cambridge. MA; MIT Press,1989). 286-30 I.8. See Douglas Crimp. Onthe Museum's Ruins(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Krauss;Phillips;and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Photographyat the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institu­tions. and Practices (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press. 1991).9. In addition to the four shows discussed here.recent examples of snapshot exhibitions includeSnapshot: An Exhibition of 1.000Artists. BaltimoreContemporary Museum. 2000; Snapshot. AldrichContemporary Art Museum. 2002; Photobooth.Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester.Massachusetts. 2003; Picture Taken. PanopticonGallery. Waltham. Massachusetts. 2004; In theVernacular: Everyday Photographs fram the RogerKingston Collection, Photographic ResourceCenter. Boston University. 2005; Snapshots: Framthe Box Brownie to the Camera Phone. Museum ofPhotographic Arts. San Diego. 2005; AccidentalMysteries. Peabody Essex Museum. Salem. Massa­chusetts. 2007; and TheArt of the AmericanSnapshot, 1888-/978: From the Collection ofRobert E.jackson. National Gallery of Art.Washington. DC. 2007. Also related to thiscuratorial genre. but with more emphasis on theuse of vernacular photography in hand-crafteddomestic objects. are Pop Photogrophica:Photography's ObjectsinEverydoy Life. 1842-/969.Art Gallery of Ontario. 2003; Create and BeRecognized: Photography on the Edge. Yerba BuenaCenter for the Arts, San Francisco, 2004; andForget Me Not:Photography and Remembrance. VanGogh Museum. Amsterdam. and InternationalCenter of Photography. New York. 2005.

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 hastermed an incoherence, a visible disjuncture between the photograph's contin­

gent social meaning-and here we might recall Batchen's desire to "restore pho­tography to its own history"-and its designation as art.? By concentrating on

composition and form in the absence of the particular histories that tether thesnapshot to a "real world" of social interaction and individual affective response,

Snapshots elevated snapshot photography to the level of fine art only to undercutits 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 relation­

ship between photography's vernacular culture and the aestheticizing function ofthe 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 sitcomfortably within the hermetic aesthetic space of the modern museum galleryseems 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 withthe rhetorical framework in which it is made public and visible." How then, hasthe 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 ofArt's Other Pictures:VernacularPhotographs from the Thomas Walther Collection (2000) and the J. Paul Getty Museum's

Close toHome: 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 totransform the snapshot into an accidental masterpiece, suitable for framing and

exhibition alongside the other great works of painting, sculpture, and architecturethat comprise its world-famous collection. The Getty took an avowedly more pop­

ulist approach, attempting to bring the museum to the everyday photographer byembracing the vernacularity of the snapshot. its sentimentality. and its function asa touchstone for personal narrative. Both exhibitions, then, sought to bridge thegap between fine art and vernacular culture and, in so doing, establish vernacularphotography as part of the institutional history of the medium as a whole. But inneither case was this legitimizing project as simple or as successful as it mightappear. Much of the rhetoric and logic behind these shows that purport to openup the field of photographic study, to legitimate the amateur artist, and to broad­en the museum's cultural scope is often, if circuitously, based on preexisting insti­tutional discourses of modernist autonomy and sentimental humanism. Indeed, Iwill argue that the strategies of these exhibitions have far more in common withthe curatorial practices ofJohn Szarkowski and Edward Steichen at MoMA than

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10. Roland Barthes, "The Great Familyof Man,"in Mythologies (New York: Hilland Wang, 1957),100.II. Michael Kimmelman, "Past Their Targets, to aWry Truth," New York Times, June 9,2000, E27.12. Walther's is one of the largest and mostimpressive private collections of photography inthe world, comprising an estimated one to twothousand photographs that range from daguerreo­types by Albert Southworth and Josiah Hawes topostmodern prints by Vik Muniz.A portion ofthat collection, including328 modern master­pieces and fifty vernacular images, was acquiredby the Museum of Modern Art in 200 I.13. Metropolitan Museum of Art, "OtherPictures:Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas WaltherCollection: More about This Exhibition," availableonline at www.metmuseum.org/special/OtherPictures/other_more.htm.

with the socially and historically contingent readings of photography advanced

by Krauss or Batchen. By removing snapshot photography from its particular cul­tural origins and suppressing the chaotic amalgamation of individual histories

that define's vernacular photography as an organizing principle, these exhibitionsdo not so much celebrate unsung amateur artists as, to evoke Roland Barthes's

famous critique of Steichen's Family ofMan, "suppress the determining weight ofhistory." 10 This is not to say, however, that the museum exhibition of vernacular

photography is an impossible project. I will end, therefore, by turning to one

more exhibition of vernacular photography, one that seemed to let loose preciselythe vernacular unruliness that the Getty and the Met tried so hard to neutralize.The George Eastman House's Picturing WhatMatters (2002) took a truly novel

approach to the practice of exhibiting vernacular photography by refusing to con­textualize, edit, or even select the vernacular works for this exhibition. By essen­

tially allowing the community to construct its own photographic history, the

curators of PicturingWhatMatters offered a provocative new site of possibility fornegotiating the inherent conflict between everyday photographs and the museum.

"Plain as Day"

In a review of the Metropolitan Museum ofArt's Other Pictures, the NewYork Timesart critic Michael Kimmelman offered a barrage of reasons for considering the

found snapshots, framed and matted on the walls of the Met's Gilman Gallery,as something entirely different from the kinds of snapshots we encounter in our

day-to-day lives.Their quirky visual appeal, he says, is redolent of Surrealism,Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's New Vision, and outsider art. Their photographic frank­ness recalls both the"diaristic trend" in art photography (epitomized in the

gritty self-reflection of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark) and the found art of the

Dada movement. One photographic subject, Kimmelman points out, even lookslike Marcel Duchamp. The reason for these "uncanny resemblances" to highart (and artists), he conjectures, is that "amateur photographers have always

absorbed the language of professionals." If we do not buy the idea that theeveryday snapshooter has consciously or unconsciously internalized the aesthetic

rhetoric of the European avant-garde, Kimmelman further assures us that theseworks are worthy of aesthetic consideration because collectors and connoisseurshave deemed them so. Regardless of how one chooses to justify their aestheticvalue, he declares, "The art is there, plain as day."II

To a certain extent, it is. Drawn from the massive and renowned private col­lection of Thomas Walther, the Met's Other Pictures comprised eighty-five vernacu­

lar photographs, all dated roughly between 1910 and 1960 and all of anonymousorigin but for the occasional mysterious inscription on the verso or at the edgeof the frame. I2 As the press release noted, although "most of the ... photographsin the exhibition were discovered at flea markets, in shoeboxes, or in familyalbums-these found images bring to mind the work of such master photogra­phers as Walker Evans, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.' 13Thetellingly named "other pictures" are weird, erotic, terrifying, confrontational,and occasionally illegible. They fascinate with blurred subjects and accidentaldouble exposures. Here, a face is scratched out. There, an image is presented inthe surreal tonal reversal of the negative. Some are so tiny as to be almost impos-

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14.MiaFineman. OtherPictures: AnonymousPhotographs fram the Thomos WoltherCollection(Santa Fe:Twin PalmsPress. 2000). n. p.;Kimmelman. E27.

sible to make out, and some were shot so close as to make the subject entirely

abstract. A few seem to be the result of a shutter tripped accidentally, without

the photographer's knowledge. While there is a wealth of posed human faces,

there is also an unusually large number of photographs of inanimate objects: anairplane, a dirt road, an alarm clock, a television set. Thus whether or not their

authors had any idea or intention to create what they created, everyone of thesephotographs offers a unique and visually striking contrast to the banal family

photos one generally associates with snapshot photography They are the particu­lar exceptions to a genre so often defined by prom pictures, family snaps fromthe Grand Canyon, and candids of babies in bathtubs.

The Met accordingly treated these accidental Arbuses and Atgets with all the

pretensions of high art. Though the photographs were small (many were contactprints) the images were all individually matted and framed and neatly spaced

across the wall ofthe gallery at eye level, a formality that seemed deliberatelydesigned to diffuse the kind of tactile intimacies we might associate with the

everyday snapshot stuck on the refrigerator door or tucked into a wallet. The fewvintage albums and scrapbooks included in the exhibition were encased in vit­rines, protected from browsing human hands. Even the show's catalogue, printed

on heavy semigloss paper, with the small photographs reproduced to scale and

neatly centered one per large page, enforces a contemplative aesthetic distance

between photograph and viewer.What is not "plain as day" in these photographs from the Walther collection

is any clear tie between the snapshot image and a historical or socially contin­gent past. The odd logic behind this rarefication of the snapshot lies in the factthat Walther's "other pictures" are, for the most part, mistakes. We do not consid­

er the photographer's intention with Walther's found photographs because, for

the most part, they appear unintentional. Yet, in the words of the catalogue essay­ist, Mia Fineman, they are "happy accidents" and "successful failures" whichgive birth to perfect little works of art. The aesthetic significance of the"other

pictures" is, then, precisely inverse to their indexical value. Describing a photo­graph of a woman in front of a fireplace, for example, Fineman notes that "as a

literal likeness of a woman ... this picture fails miserably. But as an accidentalemblem of feminine mystique, romantic blindness, and the irreducible

unknowability of another person, it qualifies as a stunning success." With their

dates, settings, and subjects unknown and their effectiveness as snapshots marredby the photographer's ineptitude, the value of these images as indexical tracesof everyday life has all but vanished. Yet, as both Fineman and Kimmelman makeemphatically clear, the mysterious and anonymous quality of these images isprecisely what makes them appealing, opens them up to broader interpretations."Where did this incredible picture come from?" Kimmelman muses, "Let's hope

we don't find out. Much of the appeal of the best amateur snapshot is that, alien­ated from its source, it stays a riddle.Y'"

With this emphasis on distance (both physical and sentimental) and theshow's dedication, according to the press release, to reading these images as"surprising and tantalizing works of art," Other Pictures seems in some ways toemulate the formalist approach to photographic exhibition pioneered by the for­mer MoMA curator Szarkowski in his definitive 1964 show The Photographer's Eye.In that historic exhibition, Szarkowski sought to legitimate photography as an art

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Unknown Photographer, Untitled ("LegArt?"), 1944, gelatin silver print. Collection ofThomas Walther

Unknown Photographer, Untitled (USA),ca. 1925, gelatin silver print. Collection ofThomas Walther

Unknown Photographer, Untitled (USA),ca. 1925, gelatin silver print. Collection ofThomas Walther

15. John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye (NewYork: Museum of Modern Art, 1966),8.

form by distilling all of photography, regardless of genre or practical function, to

a formal vocabulary of "frame," "time," "detail," "vantage paint," and "the thingitself." 15To demonstrate the flexibility of this vocabulary, Szarkowski's exhibition

juxtaposed the work of numerous fine-art photographers-Harry Callahan,

Edward Weston, Lee Friedlander-with a wide variety of other, very differentkinds ofimages: anonymous nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, documentary

photographs of the American CivilWar and turn-of-the-century tenement life,news photos, publicity portraits, and even the occasional snapshot. While the

dehistoricizing function of Szarkowski's formal vocabulary has been soundly cri­tiqued by both Krauss and Phillips, this approach nevertheless appears alive andwell in Other Pictures. Like the odd vernacular photographs in Szarkowski's exhibi­

tion, the"other pictures" from Walther's esteemed collection are worthy of pub­

lic display because they, too, can be read and understood within the formalistidiom of art photography. Indeed, many of the Walther photographs lend them­selves nicely to Szarkowski's vocabulary. One snapshot of a man riding, orattempting to ride, a bull (backward, and quite a bit further forward on the ani­mal's back than is customary) is made all the more cryptic because of the fram­ing, which cuts the rider off at the neck. Another appears to be a conventional

group portrait depicting farmers in overalls, but for the all-important detail ofone individual's knock-kneed posture and silly grimace, barely perceptible underthe shadow of a broad-brimmed hat. Both images likely had a story to themonce, but without social or historical context, only the particular formal minuti­ae and puzzling, striking scenarios are discernible. These isolated visual elements,these artful examples of frame and detail enshrined on the walls of the Met,form the language through which one reads the image. Moreover, just asSzarkowski emphasized the latent artistry of certain vernacular photographs byframing them alongside Callahans, Westons, and Friedlanders, so the Waltherphotographs gain aesthetic cachet for being shown in the same institution thatowns a Gustave Le Gray seascape, the Temple of Dendur, and Gilbert Stuart's

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16. Stieglitz,quoted in Fineman, n. p. Stieglitzwasnotably the author of the first photographs in theMet's collection. In 1928, the story goes, Stieglitzstrode into the Met offices, portfolio in hand, andattempted to sell the museum some prints. Whenthe Met declined, Stieglitzchose to donate aselection of twenty-two prints (includinghis ownand some by his colleagues) to the museuminstead. Deborah Solomon, "But Is It Art?" NewYork TimesMagazine, October 4, 1998, 64.17. Lisette Model, untitled statement, Aperture 19,no. I, "The Snapshot" (1974): 6.

famous portrait of George Washington. Viewed through "the photographer's

eye," Walther's snapshots stand their ground in this institution's history of art.

Given the show's successful elevation of the snapshot to the realm of fineart, it seems somewhat surprising that Fineman would choose to begin her cata­

logue essay for Other Pictures with a revealing and not entirely flattering anecdoteabout the modernist art photographer parexcellence Alfred Stieglitz. She begins

by quoting Stieglitz as he expresses his suspicion of the amateur photographyboom: "Don't believe you became an artist the instant you received a gift Kodakon Xmas morning." 16 But Fineman sets up this "paterfamilias ofAmerican art

photography" only to knock him down. Photographic artistry, she teases, evok­ing Stieglitz's own artistic pretensions, is not "a full-time job that generally

requires a small circle of acolytes, a little magazine, and a long black cape."Rather, she contends, "the art of photography is notoriously promiscuous: itdoesn't ask for a lifetime of devotion, only a few moments of passionate atten­

tion and voluptuous release." In apparent contrast to modernist museum dis­

course, Fineman revels in her project of celebrating the anonymous, unskilledamateur, "the most prolific and eclectic artist of the century: Photographer Unknown."

It is here that we approach the seeming paradox at the heart of Other Pictures.Artistic genius, Fineman suggests, is something detached and occasionally

(though only by chance) accessible to the untrained, even inept general public.The Walther photos, as well as the promiscuous medium of photography as awhole, fly in the face of the studied aesthetic of Stieglitz and his peers who

would equate the role of the photographer with that of the master painter or

sculptor. As such, the Walther photos seem to challenge the very museum dis­course on which their aesthetic worth is based.

But like the visual emphasis on formal detail divorced from social content,

this reversal of the conventional notion of the artist also has precedent within the

history of art photography. Perpetuated through critical writing and the languageof curators and collectors, much of the snapshot's aesthetic value is based not

on its isolation in the museum as a rare and precious work of art, but instead onits truth to the world as an utterly unmediated, instinctual approach to image­

making. As the photographer Lisette Model famously professed,

of all photographic images [the snapshot] comes closest to truth. The snap­

shot is a specific spiritual moment. It cannot be willed or desired to beachieved. It simply happens, to certain people and not to others .... We areso overwhelmed by culture and by imitation culture that it is a relief to seesomething which is done directly, without any intention of good or bad,done only because one wants to do it. 17

From Model's perspective the snapshot represents the ultimate naturalizationor essence of photographic aesthetics, a form of photography at degree zero.

Embodying the pure aesthetic perfection of something that can be neitherlearned nor taught, the snapshot becomes, in this light, something entirelyunconscious and outside the realm of qualitative assessment. This essentialism isalso central to the ideology of the Other Pictures exhibition. In his brief acknowl­edgments in the catalogue, Walther explains that the found masterpieces in hiscollection "document a profound innocence, tremendous pride and a uniquesense of humor in American society.There is no faking, no strain, no theory

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18. Thomas Walther, acknowledgments, OtherPictures, n. p.; Fineman, n. p.19. Phillips,36, 35.

here, only the simplicity and directness of capturing moments of life." Fineman

adds that snapshots possess "a freewheeling formal energy and spontaneity, a

charming lack of sophistication and artless authenticity, a palpable sense of quo­

tidian mystery--stylistic qualities that seemed both enviable and up for grabs." 18

Once again, then, formal and aesthetic appreciations of the art of the snap­shot obscure the very deliberate social conditions of the photographs' origins.

Everyday snapshot photographs are rarely accidental, are often manufactured toconform to specific social and cultural conventions, and certainly are not made

"without any intention of good or bad." What Walther and Fineman describe as"humor" and "mystery" respectively are as likely products of Simple error as of

an innate sensibility and desire for photography's visual directness. But I am lessinterested here in making an argument about the cultural constructedness of the

snapshot genre than in understanding how this particular aspect of that culturalconstruction functions within the aestheticizing context of the museum. Thesnapshots that find their way into museums are defined here in terms of their

lack of aesthetic pretensions, their guileless functionality, and, more often thannot, the anonymity of their authors. But at the same time they are beautiful little

formal masterpieces of a quality that professional photographers can only dreamof achieving.What emerge, then, are two parallel lines of discourse, one that priv­

ileges the formal vocabulary of photographic aesthetics and visual analogies to the

history of modern fine-art photography, and the other that focuses on the imme­diacy, the "real" quality of the snapshot as a form of photography at degree zero.

I would like to suggest, however, that these parallel yet seemingly contradic­

tory lines of discourse are not as distinct as they might appear. Indeed, as in thecase of Other Pictures, one often feeds into and reinforces the other. In "The Judg­

ment Seat of Photography," Phillips offers an interesting observation on thepolitics of photographic aesthetics at MoMA under the museum's first director of

the photography department, Beaumont Newhall. Phillips describes Newhall'scuratorial approach to photography as a quest to imbue the photograph with theaesthetic characteristics of "rarity, authenticity, and personal expression." This is

demonstrated in Newhall's exhibition of work by the nineteenth-century pho­

tographer Charles Marville, known for documenting the close and circuitousstreets in the condemned sections of Paris before the urban renovation of BaronGeorges-Eugene Haussmann. Phillips writes;

For Newhall, Marville's photographs can be considered "personal expressions"principally by virtue of the photographer's "subtle lighting and careful ren­

dition of detail." Having once established this priority, any social/historicalresidue can be unobtrusively rechanneled as nostalgia-in Newhall's words,"the melancholy beauty of the condemned and vanished past." 19

The term "nostalgia" is a tricky one, and its meaning is often as vague as whatit connotes. But I think the way Phillips evokes it here is particularly valuable inunderstanding how the history behind the vintage snapshot, however distant orunknowable, is sanitized through the rhetoric of public memory and affect. LikeBarthes's critique of another nostalgic photography exhibition at MoMA, The

Family ofMan, in which he sees common human experiences reduced to broad andunspecific truisms of life and death, Phillips presents nostalgia here as somethingtautological and empty, the "beauty" of a vanished past that stands in opposition

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Unknown Photographer, Untitled (NewYork City), ca. 1940, gelatin silver print.Collection of Thomas Walther

Unknown Photographer, Untitled (USA),ca. 1935, gelatin silver print. Collection ofThomas Walther

Unknown Photographer, Untitled (USA),ca. 1960, gelatin silver print. Collection ofThomas Walther

20. Hambourg, quoted. in Vince Aletti, "The Callof the Wild," Village Voice, June 20, 2000, 133.

to the historical circumstances of its vanishing. In this mode, nostalgia becomes

an ideological tool, masked in the vague rhetoric of public sentiment.

Similarly, I read the pronouncements of truth surrounding the snapshots in

Other Pictures as a carefully designed exercise in control. Walther's nod to the

"humor ofAmerican society" cites the social function of the snapshot genrewithout ever making it fully accessible to his audience. Like the nostalgia ofSteichen's Family ofMan or Marville's photographs of a pre-Haussmannized Paris,

Other Pictures raises the specter of history only to erase it under the generalizingthemes of humanity, the past, or truth. And while Model, Walther, and Fineman

wax poetic about the snapshot's immediacy, its innocence, and its "free-floatingvisual intelligence," these are not the qualities that define Other Pictures' striking

photograph of the Empire State Building looming from behind a rooftop, or avertiginous upward shot of a telephone pole, or a close-up of a TV screen fram­

ing the head and shoulders of Sammy Davis, Jr.What strikes the audience aboutthese images, even if they do not draw immediate visual analogies to the work

of Stieglitz, Moholy-Nagy, and Friedlander, is their alien and unusual qualities.No one would confuse these images with the photographs from a family album.

Their modernist aesthetic autonomy from all that is socially and culturally familiarabout the conventional snapshot genre is too overt; "the art is there, plain as day."

What is confounding about Other Pictures, then, is how deftly and completelythe images were removed from their social contingencies and their own historiesdespite or rather because of the show's apparent embrace of the untrained ama­

teur photographer. Amateur artists were selected and celebrated on the condition

of their anonymity, and their work appreciated only through aesthetic formalismand the murky filter of nostalgia. Moreover, in the absence of a real author, the

one figure that all of the photographs are nominally identified with is the geniuscollector, Walther, who with what the Met photography curator Maria MorrisHambourg has called his"great intelligent eye," seems to stand in for the masterartist. 20 The modernist aesthetic of the show analogizes these images to the

found object; thus, despite Fineman's professions that genius is free-floating and

never intentional, Other Pictures reveals itself to be a highly intentional project,

with Walther as a latter-day Duchamp, boosting the prestige of the curator andthe collector and elevating photographic mistakes to the level of fine art.

Everyday Pictures

If Other Pictures seems to draw from the curatorial approach of Szarkowski byemphasizing the formal uniqueness of the image to create a modernist snapshotavant-garde, then the Getty's Close to Home seems more in keeping with the abstractlysentimental and populist rhetoric of Steichen's tenure at MoMA. Indeed, as theintroductory wall text declared: "This exhibition takes the Family ofMan concept... to a new intimate level: the perspective of the participants themselves." WhatI think this means is that while, like Family ofMan, the themes of the show wereperceived to be universal, the perspective was not that of journalists or art pho­tographers, but of amateurs, expressing the American experience from withinand recording it as they were feeling it. Close toHome was fittingly both broadlythematic and dedicated to the plurality, variety, and abundance of snapshot pho­tography. While the spare isolation of individual images in Other Pictures on the

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Unknown Photographer, Untitled("Christmas Tree and TV"), December1960, gelatin silver print. Promised gift of MichaelBlasgen and Michael Wilson to the J. Paul GettyMuseum (photograph provided by J. Paul GettyMuseum, Los Angeles)

Unknown Photographer, Untitled("Christmas Tree"), ca. 1900, gelatin silverprint. Collection of Robert FlynnJohnson

21. Weston Naef, preface, Close to Home: AnAmerican Album (Los Angeles: Getty Publications,2004), 5; "Candid America," Los Angeles CIty Beat,December 23, 2004, available online at www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/ detail/?lssueNum=81&id= 1494.22. J. Paul Getty Museum, press release for Closeto Home, October 7,2004.

wall and in the catalogue was one of the many elements of that exhibition that

divorced the snapshot from its affective social origins, Close toHome set out to cel­ebrate precisely the elements of community and culture that inform the genre.

Even the title, Close toHome, emphasizes a familiarity and a relevance to quotidian

life that is in striking opposition to the cultivated strangeness of Other Pictures.According to Close toHome curator Weston Naef, "The social fuel of snapshotsresides in their abundance not their rarity, and their vast quantity expresses the

collective social experience of postindustrial American society."As one reviewercannily observed, "The Getty would not be the first to exhibit amateur photogra­

phy, but while others had focused specifically on the surreal, the damaged, orthe erotic, no museum had focused on ordinary pictures."21

Close toHome's emphasis on "ordinary pictures" took a plurality of forms,

fragmenting the exhibition into a series of smaller sections, each approachingthe overall theme of the show from a slightly different angle. At the entrance

to the exhibition was a section titled "Family Photographs." The photographsin this section were all from the vast Getty collection and ranged from portraits

by famous photographers like Stieglitz, Weston, and Dorothea Lange to olddaguerreotypes and "snapshots by untrained makers ... found by collectors andpurchased over the years in open-air markets.T" Bridging photography's early

years to the latter half of the twentieth century and including"great" photogra­

phers alongside amateur, anonymous ones, this area of the exhibition positedthat photography, particularly personal photography, was both democratic andinstinctive, reflecting what the exhibition defined as "the basic human desire to

represent ourselves and those closest to us." Another section of the exhibition,titled "Americans in Kodachrome," also focused on the overlap of art and snap­

shot culture, but from a more collaborative perspective. Comprising a selectionof large-format Kodachromes, printed by the artists Gary Strichertz and Irene

Malli, "Americans in Kodachrome" memorialized a particular moment in post­war American snapshot culture in all its campy, colorful glory. In marked contrast

to the vast majority of snapshot images exhibited in Close toHome and elsewhere,these images had specific provenances-real names, dates, and places that linkedthem to their owners, subjects, and producers.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, titled "Lost and Found," had the most in

common with the Met and SFMoMA shows. It consisted of vintage snapshots,nearly two hundred of them, in both black-and-white and color, dating roughlybetween the 1930S and the 196os."Lost and Found" was introduced by a briefstatement from one of the collectors responsible for the selection of images, GailPine. Her fascination with vintage snapshot photography, she writes, "grew outof a serious reflection upon personal history, genealogy, and memory." It is clearthat this reflection is no nostalgic abstraction of history and memory, but isinstead, as she makes clear, her literal, personal history and memory. Pine collectsphotographs, she suggests, to fill in the gaps of her own imperfect family his­tory: "Other people's photographs became, for me, a family to replace a brokenone caused by the loss of my father and, with him, the loss of much of my fami­ly's photo history."23 We, the audience, can reasonably assume that each imagemeans something very specific to her-the face in one photo might remind herof a relative, a child's stuffed toy may evoke her own formative years-but theinstallation does little to explore Pine's particular attractions to certain images or

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Unknown Photographer. Untitled (detailfrom "Twenty Photo Booth Self Portraits:Women in Hats"). 1930s-1940s, gelatin silverprint. Promised gift of Michael Blasgen andMichael Wilson to the J. Paul Getty Museum(photograph provided by J. Paul Getty Museum.Los Angeles)

Unknown Photographer, Untitled (USA).ca. 1940, gelatin silver print. Collection ofThomas Walther

23. Gail Pine. "Lost and Found." introductory textpanel and biographical insert. final proof. J. PaulGetty Museum. September 27. 2004.

the specific reasons for those attractions. We cannot presume that such personal

motivations will have any bearing on our reception of the images she has selected,

and thus, within the space of the gallery the images are cleared of such specific

details, sanitized of private meaning. But the assumption is that these photographs

will fill in different gaps for each audience member. Matted and framed (althoughthis time grouped in symmetrical squares of four or nine photographs together),

these lost and found snapshots are once again presented as compelling and fasci­

nating but vague, a trace of a nostalgic American past with all the necessary haze

of sentimental memory.The found images in the "Lost and Found" section of Close toHome do,

however, pose a notable contrast to the photographs in either Other Pictures orSFMoMA's Snapshots. They are, indeed, "ordinary pictures." Some are silly, manyare quaint, and a few, like a color photo of a woman in a bikini standing with a

rifle in one hand and a dead rabbit in the other, are downright puzzling. For the

most part, however, they look like the kind of snapshots that might show up in

any average photo album. This gives the Getty audience a point of entry that ismissing from other snapshot shows. For example, one photograph in Close toHome

depicts a Christmas tree, decked out in the corner of an inauspicious family home

circa 1955. There is nothing particularly unusual about this image. The viewermight enjoy the "retro" decor of the home or might note the puzzling absenceof a human subject in the image, but there is nothing surreal or alien about the

act of recording the holidays by taking a snapshot of the family Christmas tree.SFMoMA's Snapshots exhibition also included a photograph of a Christmas tree. The

tree depicted in Snapshots is similarly alone, unaccompanied by festive children onChristmas morning, and is framed by the recognizable decor of a time past, per­

haps the 1930S. But in contrast to the photograph in the Getty show, this tree isnotably thin and dry. It is placed in front of a window, as Christmas trees often

are, but since the sun is shining through the window behind, the tree looksemaciated and withered. It is easy to speculate on how such a photograph might

have come to be. Perhaps the photographer put off taking the picture until the

tree was past its peak. Perhaps she was not a very good photographer and couldnot predict the effect of the backlighting on her photographic subject. But what

comes across in the image is a disconcerting sense of strangeness. Why, onewonders, would anyone want to take such a photograph?

A similarly illuminating comparison could be drawn between the selection

of photobooth pictures in different exhibitions, a collection of them from Close toHome and a single image from Other Pictures. Again, the former seem comfortablewith their ordinary status. Photobooths are ideal for producing the kind of weirdand wonderful photographs that characterize many snapshot exhibitions becausethey inspire subjects to do all manner of silly and performative things for thecamera. Yet the photobooth pictures in Close toHome are truly nothing special.Some of the subjects are smiling, some not. Some are women and some men;

some are black and some white. Together, they form an assortment of averagepeople of the sort you might see walking down the street. Occasionally someone

is caught with eyes closed or distracted by something out of the frame, but allare simple portraits of a kind that would not be out of place in a small frame oralbum, or even on a driver's license. The presentation of these images reiteratesthis comfortable, ordinary sensibility. On the wall of the Getty they were clustered

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24. J. PaulGetty Museum, "Close to Home: AnAmerican Album, Your Submissions," January 3D,2007, available online at www.getty.edu/art/exhi­bitions/c1ose_to_home/album2.html

together, adding a sense of informality despite their individual frames. In the

catalogue they appear scattered across the pages of a double-page spread, notentirely symmetrical, some in the gutter and some cut off at the edge. In contrast,

the single photobooth image from Other Pictures has none of this comfortable

familiarity.The image is small and recognizable as a photobooth print primarilyfrom the telltale curtain backdrop. The subject is a dark-haired woman, though

we can discern little else about her since her back is presented squarely to thecamera. With the sleek and angular style of her 1940S hairdo and the clean,

structured shoulder pads of her dark suit, the faceless shape seems barely human,a study in simple symmetrical forms. Without the benefit of the usual photo­

booth sequence (four shots taken in succession) and isolated in a spare frameon the gallery wall, the image seems to challenge the viewer to find any point

of reference outside the basic formal composition of the image.Paradoxically, then, the photograph of the Christmas tree and the photo­

booth portraits from Close toHome are exceptional precisely because they areunexceptional. The Getty show focused explicitly on the social and cultural his­

tory of the United States as presented through the photographs of everydaypeople. Though few of the images have specific historical contexts, together they

create an informative archive of photographic conventions and traditions. Theconventions depicted through this accumulation of images are textured withindividual anomalies and errors that read not as formal conundrums or quotid­

ian mystery, but simply as the natural variations bound to occur in such a wide­

ranging and accessible photographic genre. In this way, Close toHome comes farcloser to creating a truly vernacular history of photography than any previousexhibition in this vein and, as such, offers a refreshing alternative to the aes­

theticized control of Other Pictures. But despite the careful thinking that clearly

went into understanding the snapshot genre before presenting it to the public,I believe the tension between the discourse of the museum and the functional

characteristics of the genre still exists in the Getty show. Moreover, I find thattension to be not only resistant to but also aggravated by the exhibition's pop­

ulist rhetoric.To better understand how this occurs, I want to examine one final element

of Close toHome, a coda to the show that was accessible only after one had leftthe gallery space. It was (and is) an online archive or "virtual album" of snap­shots submitted by museum and website visitors over the show's seven-weekduration. 24 While the website was arguably less a part of the show than a pro­motional tool cooked up by museum programmers, I think it deserves scrutinybecause it throws into relief the successes and failures of the Getty's explicitly

democratic approach. The snapshots in the Getty's virtual album appear in asmall format (about three inches high on my eight-and-a-half-by-thirteen-inchcomputer screen) and have no authors' names listed. They are organized only byweek of submission but can be accessed by searching for a submitter's e-mailaddress. Each picture is complemented by the "story behind the image," some­where between one and eight lines of text offering everything from establishingfacts and Signifying contexts to personal, affective responses. While these storiesadd a certain poignancy to the images they accompany, they are also very anony­mous. Subjects are without exception referred to by first names or familial rela­tions ("Alex and Pop," "Uncle Chuck"), and places and contexts are often vague

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("the beach," "prom night," "a fun camping trip"). The pictures themselves run

a wide gamut from utterly banal and formulaic photographs of pets, birthday

parties, family vacations, and small children to odd, anomalous images: a mail­

man's self-portrait taken (apparently with the aid of a timer) from inside a mail­

box, a bleached-out portrait that appears to be of the painter Chuck Close (theaforementioned "Uncle Chuck"), peering ominously from an all-black back­

ground, a black-and-white photo of a man, supporting a woman and small childprecariously on his shoulders and titled only "a family."

In theory, this web project complements the populist social orientation ofthe show by allowing its audience to be a part of the photographic exhibition, to

show and tell their own photographs, which, the website suggests, are as valid as

any in the museum. Yet they are not, quite. The contemporary photographic sub­

missions on the website were likely seen by only a fraction of the visitors to themuseum, and then perhaps only by individuals who submitted their own snap­shots. Moreover, even in this informal online forum, the aesthetic framework

of the museum creeps in. In contrast to the"democratic" nature of the genre asa whole, the photographs in the online album were selected by Getty curators

from a larger pool of submissions. Predictably, as banal as many of the snapshots

in the online album are, they also appear to be the cream of the crop. There areno thumbs across the lens, no red eyes, and a remarkable dearth of stiff frontal

poses. The vast majority are charming and flattering, depicting particularly sweetor poignant moments, and thus they represent more the ideal than the day-to-day

reality of snapshot practice. It seems likely, as well, from the uniform vagueness ofthe captions that some measure of control was imposed on how much establish­

ing information could be given with each photograph. Echoing the curatorialview that some snapshots are "emblematic of the collective experience" (and, we

can presume, others are not), the captions for these images are deliberately open­ended, offering not so much a collage of particular private pictures as a nostalgic

gloss on the poignancy and potential of the snapshot genre as a whole.This web project is, then, emblematic of a larger shortcoming in Close to

Home's exhibition strategy.Though dedicated to the social function of the snap­shot photograph, the Getty show, too, struggles with the conflict between that

social function and the modernist discourse of the museum-the importance ofaesthetics, selection, and the universality of the work of art. Close toHome takes a

pluralistic perspective and as such depicts the genre of snapshot photographyas something distinct from and more socially contingent than modernist art

photography; nevertheless it falls into many of the tropes that define modernistmuseum practices. For example, and as with Other Pictures, the question of author­ship is ever present. While the show attempts to situate the work of amateur

photographers alongside that of artists and other photography professionals, thecachet of the true artist, as compared to the snapshooting amateur, is never com­pletely dispelled. The large majority of the amateur images, including the imagessubmitted online, are still anonymous. The few instances where the photographerand subject are identified are confined to the "Americans in Kodachrome"

project, where the individual names on the discrete title cards are supersededby the much larger name (and headshot) of the artist on the wall next to theexplanatory text. As much as the curators emphasize the perspective of the ama­teur, everyday snapshooter, then the photographs in the exhibition suffer from

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25. J. Paul Getty Museum, "Exhibition Celebratesthe American Photo Album, with FamilySnapshotsGathered from around the Country," pressrelease, October 7,2004.26. George Eastman House, "George EastmanHouse commemorates Sept. I I anniversary witha tribute in pictures," press release, July 30, 2002.

the same rhetoric of universalism; they are tagged as visual elements of a "sharedmemory," "strangely familiar" despite their specific and dissociated origins."

Thus, to a certain extent, Close toHome comes a bit too close to the sentimental

humanist model of Family ofMan. It is nostalgic, generalized to the point of

undermining its carefu11y cultivated plurality, and as such it fails to truly engagethe rich culture of snapshot photography.

Both Close toHome and Other Pictures, then, despite their drastically differentframing, are caught between the function of the image and the rarefying aesthetic

of the museum. Regardless of curatorial vision, it would seem, the snapshot thatfinds its way into the museum is consistently framed by the institutional rhetoric

of modernist art photography. Snapshots are seen to capture, however ephemer­ally and accidentally, the vision of modernist art photography. But when it comes

to reading these images, curators and critics commonly draw attention to thesnapshot's social function: the formation of social bonds, the ca11 to narrative, the

impetus for affective response, and the universality of photographic language.How can these two interpretations exist side by side? The answer, I think, is that

they do not. As Other Pictures demonstrates, the rhetoric of truth and social imme­diacy are often used to render the real social function of the photograph impo­

tent, thus reinforcing the aesthetic value of the image. Conversely,Close toHomeemploys narrativity, affect, and social history to frame the modern museum inpopulist terms, but in so doing it erases the particularity of its varied photo­

graphic images in favor of an anonymous and nostalgic "universal" ideal.

Snapshots that Matter

I want to conclude by briefly examining one more museum exhibition of snap­shot photography, but one that was rather differently motivated from those dis­

cussed above. As the one-year anniversary of the September I I, 2001, bombingof the World Trade Center approached, the George Eastman House InternationalMuseum of Photography and Film (GEH) in Rochester, New York, prepared to

mark the solemn event with a large and multifaceted exhibition of photographs.The show, titled Picturing WhatMatters:An Offering ofPhotographs, had three compo­

nents. The first was a selection of iconic photographs from the GEH's impressiveprivate co11ection, chosen by the museum staff as images "that affirm the beliefsand ideals held by a people and a nation." 26 This component of the exhibition,

traveling through 2008 to museums and historical societies around the UnitedStates, included a wide variety of vernacular and commercial images alongsidepatriotic"greatest hits" like Lange's Migrant Mother and Joe Rosenthal's Raising ofthe

Flag at Iwo Jima. Bringing this photographic nostalgia trip up to date was a secondcomponent that illustrated the events of September I I through news photo­graphs, audio recordings, and video footage, with particular emphasis placed onthe local media and their contribution to national perceptions of the event. Bothof these exhibition components offered thoughtful, if not entirely groundbreak­ing, considerations ofAmerican visual culture up to and surrounding the trau­

matic events of 9/ I I .

But by far the most interesting element of Picturing WhatMatters was a thirdcomponent described in an early press release as "a tribute in pictures from theRochester community ... a slice ofAmerica-a representative community out-

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PicturingWhat Matters exhibition,installation view, George Eastman House,Rochester, New York, 2002 (photograph ©Barbara Galasso)

side of New York City or Washington, nC.-that, too, has been affected bySeptember I I," Beginning in July of 2002, the museum put out a call to the local

community to "tell the world in a picture what is important to you." Advertised

locally through fliers, posters, newspaper advertisements, and on the museumwebsite, the GEH encouraged community members to "send us your photo thatrepresents your values, hopes, or dreams." The advertisement stipulated that the

photographs be copies only, not originals; color or black-and-white; neither

mounted, matted, nor framed; and no larger than sixteen by twenty inches.Beyond these qualifications, members of the community were welcome to sub­

mit whatever seemed significant to them. No matter who sent in photographs or

what they represented, the museum promised to display each and everyone ofthe images on its walls.

The result was an astounding installation of over thirteen hundred pho­

tographs, rotated out every two weeks for the five-month duration of the exhi­

bition to accommodate all the submissions. Given the openness of the call forimages, the photographs were somewhat varied, running the gamut fromPhotoshop collages of the Statue of Liberty and the American flag to blatantlyhomoerotic images of shirtless biker boys in leather pants and mirrored sun­glasses. But the vast majority of submitters followed the visual lead suggested inthe advertisements and chose to express "what matters" through their own, veryordinary personal snapshots. The effect was staggering. Wall after wall was plas­tered floor to ceiling with adorable children's antics, family vacations, and holidaycelebrations, each image an isolated glimpse into the sentimental self-fashioning

of a perfect stranger. Some images were captioned by the submitter, with fullname, hometown, and narrative description neatly typed onto index cards.Others remained anonymous, defiantly mute. Some were blown up large, while

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27. Amanda Kraus and Minda Kauffman,"America's Museums Observe Sept. II," MuseumNews, September-October 2002, I I.

others were standard four-by-five-inch prints straight from the drugstore enve­

lope. As specified in the call for photographs, none were framed or matted. Withthis vast, haphazard collage of images and none of the familiar signifiers that

accompany the work of art in the museum, the GEH's walls looked more like acrowded bulletin board or refrigerator door than a space for the exhibition of

fine-art photography.The installation was off-putting, to say the least. Neither the images them­

selves nor the exhibition strategy seemed oriented to public consumption. With­out any attempt to frame or organize the photographs, it is somewhat unclearhow the museum anticipated its audience's reaction to the show. Certainly nos­

talgia, patriotism, and grief were expected-according to an article in MuseumNews, the Red Cross of Rochester, a co-organizer of the exhibition, trained thestaff to "handle strong emotional responses, and provide support as needed."27

But what might be the basis for this kind of strong emotional response? What

kind of nostalgia, even in the vague terms I have described above, is elicited by

looking at a mass of cryptic and banal family pictures of complete strangers?Aside from searching for one's own contribution to the show-a factor that Isuspect drew a significant number of the popular show's attendees-I found

myself at a loss to understand how anyone might process this sea of thoroughly

private, largely visually uninteresting images.Because of its refusal to frame, contextualize, organize, or even discriminate

among thousands of photographic submissions, PicturingWhatMatters was largelyunintelligible, but it was also revolutionary, and for many of the same reasons.First, the show was conceived in democratic terms: representing the community

as a whole by allowing each member of the community to represent herself

Without the condition of anonymity or the mediation of a collector or curator's"intelligent eye," the authors of these vernacular images were left free to lay

claim to their own visual statements. Thus, within the context of this show,anonymity was a choice, not a prerequisite. Second, the exhibition was chaotic,

absurd, offering no strategy for comprehending the heterogeneous mass ofimages-perhaps because no strategy exists that would not undermine the goalofrepresenting "what mattered" to its individual contributors. As such, the exhi­

bition called attention to a different kind of public photographic consumption,

one that seemed utterly resistant to formalist aesthetics or generalized nostalgiaof the exhibitions discussed above and fully in keeping with the discrete, partic­ular, affective, and political meanings of most snapshot-photographs.

Also central to the function of this exhibition is the museum's blatant(and highly practical) disregard for aesthetic convention and the "uniqueness"of the photographic image. In marked contrast to the photographs from theWalther collection-or for that matter the photographs in any of the museum orprivate collections that have constituted the vast majority of recent vernacular­photography exhibitions-the photographs in the Picturing WhatMatters exhibitionclung fiercely to what Walter Benjamin termed photography's "exhibition value"in the age of mechanical reproduction. 28 While Walther's photos were oncereproducible, their negatives have been lost, transforming the existing prints intoprecious, singular artifacts.Yet the Picturing WhatMatters photographs were solicitedin the form of disposable copies, privileging their immediacy and circulationover their "presence in time and space." Regardless of the eventual fate of these

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28. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in theAge of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations(New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 223.29. This installation approach bears some resem­blance to another photographic response to theevents of 9/1 I. Here Is New York: A Democracy ofPhotographs solicited photographs of the WorldTrade Center tragedy from the general public anddisplayed them, unframed and often in multiplerows across the gallery walls. Unlike PicturingWhat Matters, however, Here Is New York stroveto create a more explicitly aesthetic value for theimages on display. The HereIs New York pho­tographs were all uniform in size and larger thanstandard snapshots, presented on eight-and-one­half-by-eleven-inch photo paper with a neat whiteborder. Notably, they were also for sale, in unlim­ited editions, in exchange for a $25 charitabledonation to the Children's Aid Society. Finally,though the name of the photographer was onlyrevealed to the buyer after the photograph hadbeen paid for, press material made clear thatincluded among the works of hundreds of ama­teurs were photographs by well-known profes­sional photographers like Gilles Peress and JoelSternfeld.

images, their presence in the museum had more to do with visual accessibility

than cult value or preservation. Simply put, then, the GEHtreated these pho­

tographs like photographs, not like singular and rare works of art.What was unique about Picturing WhatMatters was the presentation of utterly

conventional snapshots, and lots of them, in a highly public space.The viewerswere given no point of entry into the thousands of photographs that lined the

wall.Yet the curators' rather brave decision not to dress them up in universalizing

rhetoric or to pare down the submissions to an elegant and iconic few confronted

the viewer with the nuts-and-bolts reality of snapshot photography, a reality thatis, for the most part, subverted by the institutional ideology of the museum set­ting.29 On the one hand, then, Picturing WhatMatters demonstrated the degree to

which the struggle between the social and cultural contingency of the photo­graph and the hermeticizing discourse of the museum is alive and well, if these

days somewhat more skillfully effaced by the populist rhetoric of the museum.

Recalling Krauss's terminology, the photographs in the exhibition posed an

effective challenge to the discursive space of the museum, making utterly explicitthe "incoherence" of the photograph, and particularly the vernacular photo­

graph, even within the context of a museum dedicated to photography.

However, Picturing WhatMatters is also significant because it made literal andvisceral what was posed only as a facade in the Met and Getty shows. The GEH

show was sentimental, overtly so. It refused to discriminate or select which pho­

tographs were worthy of public display because, as actual snapshots with realand unmediated connections to their social origins, all the submitted images

were essentially created equal. Museum-goers could seek out the single mostimportant image for them-their own-or simply marvel at the sheer chaotic

boredom of hundreds of other people's pictures. The exhibition engaged the

true character of vernacular photography: a genre that is at once deeply movingand intensely banal. Ultimately, Picturing WhatMatters drew attention neither to

the purity of a single, perfect, and highly unrepresentative snapshot masterpiece,nor to the universality of a symbolically familiar iconic snapshot. Rather, it

seemed to revel in the broad, messy diversity of snapshot practice in everydaylife. Dedicated entirely to the real-life sentiments of its viewers, Picturing What

Matters seemed to understand best that the snapshot exists as a snapshot onlythrough its social contingency. Though Picturing WhatMatters was unlikely to

inspire the aesthetic fascination evoked by the formally perfect, vernacularphotographs in the Walther collection, the GEH show did something far more

important: it served as a reminder of the disruptive possibilities of the snapshotin public contexts and the complexity of the modern museum's negotiationof the snapshot image. Probably more than any exhibition of its kind to date,

PicturingWhat Matters presented snapshot photography on its own vernacular terms.

Catherine Zuromskis is an assistant professor in the department of art and art history at the Universityof New Mexico. Her writings on vernacular photography are forthcoming in American Quarterly and theanthology Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge, 2008). She is currently completing a book manu­script entitled Intimate Exposures: TheSocial Ufeof Snapshot Photography.

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