Photography in Theory and Everyday Life

A review of Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.

What typically escapes interpretation and analysis is the commonplace. This is certainly true of snapshot photography, a practice so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Long dismissed by art historians as unworthy of aesthetic consideration, snapshot photography has only recently captured the attention of visual culture scholars, who have begun to examine snapshot images as both personal artifacts and cultural documents. In Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images, Catherine Zuromskis sets out to explore the genre “as a public and political form of visual expression in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century” (10). Zuromskis argues that because the “social life” of snapshot photography resides in both the private and public realms—in that its images are intended for family and friends, yet are consumed through conventional codes—the genre uniquely lends itself to a sense of communal belonging, and thus has the potential to aid the construction of alternative group identities. She introduces this argument by juxtaposing two images: a tourist snapshot of a little girl standing in front of the White House, and a snapshot of a group of drag queens photographing each other’s performances of femininity. The first snapshot reinforces convention, and the second subverts it, albeit by invoking the conventions it subverts.
 
Zuromskis devotes the book’s first chapter to defining the genre of snapshot photography. The following four chapters are then organized around a series of case studies that seek to elucidate this definition.  Zuromskis’s first chapter is the most important in the volume, for defining snapshot photography is not as straightforward a task as it may seem. After all, any photograph could be considered a “snap.” Theorizing the genre as both a set of “image-objects” and cultural practices, Zuromskis addresses the production of snapshots, as well as their display, exchange, editing, and ownership. Although she carefully nuances the difficulties involved in defining the genre, her lack of a conclusive definition creates difficulties for her argumentation throughout the book. Her use of the term “vernacular” often overlaps with that of “snapshot,” whereas in the book’s introduction, Zuromskis describes a snapshot as a photograph taken by an “amateur” and “made for use within the private sphere of the … family” (2). Yet this definition does not hold in the cases of the photographs featured in the book’s last two chapters, taken by artists Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin, nor does it apply to many of the photographs included in the Family of Man exhibition discussed in Chapter Three—especially those taken by professional photojournalists and produced for public consumption.
 
Despite these inconsistencies, Zuromskis’s first chapter makes a very important contribution to critical photography discourse: it argues against the longstanding notion of photography as an inherently aggressive act in which the photographer exercises power over what is photographed. This formulation, most closely associated with Susan Sontag’s influential book On Photography (1973), has undergirded feminist arguments about photography’s masculine gaze for decades. Zuromskis raises the possibility of a more intimate and shared (or shifting) power dynamic within the genre of the snapshot, and notes the snapshot’s potential to record one’s own vision of oneself and of history.
 
The book’s five chapters stand brilliantly on their own. One might argue that they collectively function to define snapshot photography according to the contradictions that, as Zuromskis puts it, “lie at the heart of snapshot culture” (111). For example, in Chapter Two, Zuromskis posits “snapshot culture,” as rendered in the 2002 film One-Hour Photo and the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU, as combining the idealism of American family values with the forces that threaten to corrupt these values, through a process she cleverly terms “snapshot perversion” (93).  Zuromskis attempts to define snapshot photography not by its “essence,” but by that which undermines its perceived qualities, reinforcing Roland Barthes’s notion that “the photograph shows us everything and nothing” (111).  Although we may accept the “truthfulness” of the photographic image due to its indexical quality, we can have no such certainty about the photographer’s motivations and intentions. Here Zuromskis begins to build her argument about the “malleability” of snapshot photography—its potential use as a means to fashion alternative modes of “sociability and personal gratification” (111).
 
In the book’s third chapter, Zuromskis turns to the inclusion of snapshot photography in museums, explaining that the institutional framework both “valorize[s]” snapshots and negates their “particular cultural relevance” (120), an argument that has long been made with respect to other visual artifacts not produced with the modern Euro-American notion of “art” in mind. In this discussion, Zuromskis focuses on a range of exhibitions: The Family of Man (1955) and The Photographer’s Eye (1962) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Snapshots (1998) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Other Pictures (2000) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Close to Home (2004) at the J. Paul Getty Museum; and Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs (2002-2003) at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. Not surprisingly, she concludes that it is only the latter—the one exhibition launched by a museum dedicated solely to photographic media—that does justice to the genre. By foregoing the modernist emphasis on the rarified print and the individual artist or collector, Zuromskis argues, the Eastman Museum achieved the “revolutionary” aim of publicly displaying personal snapshots without curatorial mediation, even though the exhibition through which it did so was largely “unintelligible” to its audience (178).
 
In Chapters Four and Five, Zuromskis analyzes Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin’s uses of the “snapshot aesthetic,” testing her hypothesis that the genre can be used to form communal alternative identities. For both artists, she argues, snapshooting was performative, a “social” act that allowed them to document their interactions with members of their inner circles, and ultimately to create what Michael Warner has termed “counterpublics” (Zuromskis 211).  Although Goldin is primarily known as a photographer, Zuromskis reminds us that Warhol is not, despite the fact that he was a prolific snapshooter and that photographic images were central to his artistic practice. Unlike “art” photographers who privilege the refined print and the aesthetics of detachment, Warhol preferred the low-tech print and the suggestion of physical and emotional intimacy. What distinguishes Warhol, Zuromskis argues, is his “queering of the snapshot,” his ability to appropriate a genre embedded in the private domestic realm and publicly politicize it (209). Likewise Goldin, whom Zuromskis characterizes as Warhol’s “heir apparent” (240), rejects the postmodern emphasis on detachment and instead photographs her countercultural community “‘inspired by love’” (241). For Goldin, what is most appealing about the snapshot aesthetic is that it lends itself to the creation and validation of a personal history, as demonstrated in her groundbreaking 1980s slide show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. However, by the time she exhibits Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls in 2007, Zuromskis argues, “Goldin … sees the snapshot for what it is: at once a liberatory mode of constructing human relations and a tool of repressive normalcy, a device for constructing and reinscribing cultural mythologies” (306). As Zuromskis explains in the title for Chapter Five, it is at this moment in Goldin’s oeuvre that the genre reaches “the limits of photographic possibility.”
 
In a short conclusion, Zuromskis raises the question that has remained implicit since its brief mention in her introduction: about the impact of the rise of digital photography on “snapshot culture.” In short, her answer is “not much.” Social exchange and the documentation of specific events are still snapshot photography’s primary functions, whether they are achieved on film or digitally. Thus the conventions and meanings of the genre remain consistent; they are merely accelerated, and rendered more accessible, immediate, and even liberating, through new technologies and media venues. Zuromskis’s “Conclusion: Afterlife” may be brief, but I agree with her that it is appropriate to leave many questions unanswered, as we have not yet acquired the critical distance to effectively analyze the shift from analog to digital. There is little doubt, however, that a major concern will be the question of indexicality, and the possible erosion of belief in  photography’s claim that what it pictures once was.
 
Zuromskis does not provide us with a history of snapshot photography, but rather with an insightful examination of this under-theorized genre. Consequently, her book will undoubtedly make its greatest impact on the field of photography theory—not on art (or even photography) history, which traditionally build narratives based on archival and other forms of primary evidence. Besides the photographs themselves, Zuromskis’s sources are almost exclusively other cultural theorists and critics; she very convincingly positions her argument within the theoretical and critical frameworks established by such figures as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Geoffrey Batchen, Michel de Certeau, Douglas Crimp, Lauren Berlant, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and of course Sontag. Her narrative is most compelling when she provides her own analysis of photographs and other visual media. This is particularly true of her work on One-Hour Photo and Law and Order: SVU, projects that, like snapshots, seem quite superficial, but which are revealed, through Zuromskis’s astute analysis, to be rich sources for understanding cultural values and behaviors—perhaps more so than visual artifacts produced for a narrow audience, such as an art world public.
 
Snapshot Photography raises as many questions as it attempts to answer. For instance, in whose scholarly domain do these image-objects reside? Art historians and visual culture specialists have the acquired skills to closely “read” images, yet they tend to aestheticize these images, and thus risk their decontextualization, as Zuromskis reminds us in her analysis of museum-exhibited snapshot photography. Such scholars and critics often focus on “high” art dignitaries, such as Warhol and Goldin, whose visual artifacts may reveal less about broader cultural leanings than those produced by the rest of us. We might also consider how successful Warhol and Goldin actually were at producing alternative modes of social belonging, especially once their photographs were subsumed by art’s institutional context. This fate has even befallen Warhol’s personal snapshots, including his Polaroids and photomatons, many of which were disseminated to museums and galleries by the Warhol Foundation after the artist’s death, along with strict stipulations as to how they are to be framed and exhibited. Perhaps the answer to the enduring mystery of photography, which has exercised a powerful hold on us since it first appeared almost 200 years ago, lies in its personal and banal appearances, rather than in the museum or fine art print. Snapshot Photography takes us a step further towards unraveling this mystery, helping us understand the important role these image-objects play in the practice of everyday life.