by John Updike
(Photo Credit Ill.34)
Such images may baffle interpretation, but they do not repel commentary. Four National Gallery curators write at some length on four periods of snapshot-taking: “Photographic Amusements, 1888–1919,” “Quick, Casual, Modern, 1920–1939,” “Fun Under the Shade of the Mushroom Cloud, 1940–1959,” and “When the Earth Was Square, 1960–1978.” Diane Waggoner tackles the thirty-year era after George Eastman’s promulgation of the first Kodak cameras: “They had a string mechanism to cock the shutter and a button to release it, and they made exposures at a shutter speed of 1/25 second.” The significant novelty wasn’t in the construction of the camera but in that of the film. Eastman had founded a company in Rochester to mass-produce gelatin dry-plate glass negatives, and after a few years he did away with the glass, inventing paper negatives that spooled onto a roll holder that fit into a standard plate camera. After a few more years, he launched a hand camera preloaded with paper negatives; he named the camera Kodak, “coining the name because it was unique and could not be mispronounced.” These early Kodaks produced round images, two and a half inches in diameter, which were developed and printed in the Rochester factory; the customer sent in the entire camera, which was returned to him, loaded with new film, along with the prints from the old, all for the not inconsiderable fee of ten dollars. “You press the button, we do the rest,” was the captivating slogan.
(Photo Credit Ill.35)
The Eastman Kodak Company proved as prolific of slogans as of technical innovations. Within a year, the complicated transfer of emulsion to a glass plate and then to a thin, flexible gelatin support had been simplified to a one-step negative on transparent film of cellulose nitrate. Within two years, a folding camera had been introduced, with a viewfinder, characterized in its early state as a “dimly lit one-inch square.” Refinement followed refinement, and slogan followed slogan: “Kodak as you go”; “A vacation without a Kodak is a vacation wasted.” By 1900, when the first Brownie was marketed for one dollar, with rolls of film at fifteen cents apiece, America was hooked. More than 150,000 Brownies were sold in the first year.
The early users were a methodical, tricksome lot; they compiled careful albums and took elaborately posed pictures, with mirrors, intentional double exposures, and trompe-l’oeil feats of perspectival foolery. The spiritualism and stage theatricality of the time were echoed in tableaux vivants, eerie masks, ghostly illusions, and fancy costumes, including some jaunty cross-dressing. Summer vacations and snowstorms were snapped up as especially worth preserving. A steadying tripod and judicious use of magnesium-based flash powder enabled indoor shots. The shutter speed was still slow enough to blur action, though by 1909 Kodak had introduced Speed Kodak film, with exposure times as fast as a thousandth of a second. America was speeding up; Waggoner writes, “When middle-class America increasingly enjoyed time at play and time on the go, the camera went along for the ride—quite literally, as cameras designed to hang on the bicycle were sold for convenience of travel.” The camera and the bicycle both generated, in this clubbable era, organizations for their group enjoyment, as did the automobile in the early decades of the twentieth century. When soldiers went off to the First World War, Eastman ads offered this advice to loved ones: “The parting gift, a Kodak. Wherever he goes the world over, he will find Kodak film to fit his Kodak.” Even in the trenches, over there.
(Photo Credit Ill.36)
In 1922, Sarah Kennel tells us in treating the years 1920–39, the poet Vachel Lindsay wrote that “the acres of photographs in the Sunday newspapers make us into a hieroglyphic civilization far nearer to Egypt than to England.” Though increasingly commonplace and versatile—“quick, casual, modern”—the camera still found employment as a faddish toy; the booklet Picture Taking at Night instructed readers how to create silhouettes with backlit models. Trickery with shadows and with perspective figures in a number of the shots that have made their way into The Art of the American Snapshot. Stop-action dives and acrobatics take us back to a more muscular, outdoorsy America; there are two discreetly non-frontal views of skinny-dippers. A number of racy exposures hint at the camera’s significant role as a de-inhibitor, an enabler of what Kennel calls “home-grown pornography.” Nudes in provocative poses were among the earliest fruits of big-box, slow-tech photography in the mid-nineteenth century; something about the camera’s impassive appropriation of whatever is set before it invites, like a psychoanalyst’s silence, self-exposure. Another new work on photographic folk art, Näkki Goranin’s American Photobooth, relates how, beginning in the 1950s:
Complaints started coming in, from Woolworth’s and other stores, that people, particularly women, were stripping off their clothes for the private photobooth camera. Couples started being a little more adventurous in the privacy of the curtained booth. As a result, many of the Woolworth’s stores had to remove their curtains to discourage naughty encounters.
(Photo Credit Ill.37)
It is good times, happy times, that we wish to preserve. In its ads of the Twenties and Thirties, Kodak insistently pushed its product as the recorder of family life. “I’ll show ’em a real family!” one jubilant snapshooter brags (“He’s something to brag about, that new baby of yours”); another spread shows two commuters on a railroad platform, one of them enviously studying the other’s snapshots and thinking, “I felt ashamed. He was so proud of his children; why hadn’t I taken snapshots of mine?” A third ad simply advises, while a proficient mother photographs her two children in their lunch booth, “Let Kodak keep the story.” The camera both exalted and invaded domestic privacy—“Candid photography is making us human goldfish,” one pundit wrote in the journal Photography in 1938. Letting Kodak keep the story constituted one more formerly human operation delegated to machines; our anniversaries and children’s birthdays were remembered for us, in caches of snapshots. A vacation became a string of photo ops, a mechanical escape from what one writer, in 1928, called “the circumscribed routine of factory, store, or office.” At many a wedding, the hired photographer replaced the minister as the central officiator.
Sarah Greenough deals with the years 1940–59, under the rather frantic head “Fun Under the Shade of the Mushroom Cloud.” By 1940, flashbulbs, the color film Kodachrome and Agfacolor-Neu, and the superb Leica camera, using 35-millimeter film, had been invented. Increasingly cheap and handy color film followed. In 1948, the Polaroid Corporation offered the Land Camera, which made black-and-white prints in sixty seconds, thus cutting out the local developer and making snapshot-taking more private than ever. But perhaps these innovations, and ever more automatic features relieving the photographer of control over focus and exposure time, made amateur photography too easy, for there is a discernible falling-off of artistic energy in the post-war snapshots exhibited. Except for a joyous nude of a fat girl with her eyes shut in an ecstasy of embarrassment, and a stunning pair of tan legs that are, Greenough tells us, a man’s, and a scrawny Arbusian Christmas tree in a corner, and some few others, the photos tend to look like television—fuzzy slices of life, cut with a dull knife. This section is the only one that presents a named photographer, a young Midwestern woman identified as Flo; she lived at a Milwaukee YWCA and snapped shots of the other young women living there, none of whom, from the evidence, wanted to be photographed. Greenough tells us, as we can see, “They covered their faces with their hands or magazines; they turned and walked away or closed their doors in her face; they stuck their tongues out at her unwelcome intrusions.” Flo’s photographs, of which thirty-two, usually flash-lit, examples are included in the catalogue, rarely peek outdoors; their invariably female subjects, caught doing dishes or washing their hair, seem to nervously inhabit a flimsy bomb shelter. Greenough gamely theorizes:
From our own experiences, we instinctively know when viewing snapshots like these that they, unlike many carefully crafted works of art or fully articulated documents, possess a kind of truth that is both profound and unassailable. But what that truth is pre
cisely remains forever unknown.
Fifties existentialism, which also gave us the deadpan facticity of the nouveau roman and, in cinema, the nouvelle vague, gives us the dogged dreariness of Flo’s unknown, though profound and unassailable, truth. The camera has acquired a will of its own, blindly recording unwilling subjects like a robotized vacuum cleaner nosing into every corner of the room.
Matthew S. Witkovsky, taking up the years 1960–78, heaves the most ornate critical language into the bottomless pit of the ordinary. He claims that the square shape favored by Brownies and Polaroids “supplants narrative flow with iconic stasis, and it tends to draw attention away from the picture toward the object as such.” He mischievously proposes that “making one’s own pictures in these years might be said for the first time to match in its breadth and banality the daily experience of seeing pictures by others.” Public and private achieve a null parity. Photographs of children, common in every era, “reveal a perhaps unaccustomed level of nonchalance that separates them from earlier family snapshots and potentially from those made more recently as well”; several show children in perilous situations and suggest “a remarkable, even disconcerting privileging of humor over safety.” The week’s funniest, most brutal videos are around the corner. Over all, Witkovsky decrees, “many of these pictures seem insistently mundane and emotionally awkward”; the vulgar or obscene gestures in a number of them “might be interpreted as a sign of increasing social recklessness, part of ‘sixties culture,’ its echoes and aftermath.” American mores and manners, in short, are going to pot, and Kodak is there to keep the story. Art photography, once distinctly aloof, with its sharp-focus nudes, mountains, and still lifes, from amateur snapshooting, now “takes a turn toward unremediated—and therefore highly provocative—banality” in the work of “avant-garde artists such as Acconci, John Baldessari, and Dan Graham, all of whom use photography (or so they claim) as a mute and inexpressive tool.” Garry Winogrand photographed with a random lavishness that left thousands of undeveloped rolls at his death, “a snapshooter run amok.” The determination “to drain formal interest, to de-skill the creative process, generates an aesthetic that many at the time called ‘neutral’ or ‘affectless’ but which seems more accurately described as somewhere between kitsch and tedium.” Where Kodak set up shop to glorify the American family, a modern master like Diane Arbus makes it appear appalling.
The photographic impulse, as I experienced it in my days as a Nikon-toting daddy, wore two aspects, the creative and the commemorative. The first sought to catch, in the plump snap of the shutter, something vivid and even beautiful in its color and contour; the second aim, more realistic though in a sense grander, was to halt the flow of time. The camera, that highly evolved mechanism, put into Everyman’s untrained hands the chance to become, if half by accident, a death-defying artist.
The collector Robert Jackson deserves the last shot; his afterword to the catalogue manages to cast a pall of reasonableness over his curious passion. He coins the phrase “a visual trophy” for a medium that “seeks to preserve an idealized and individualized moment in time.” Attempting to explain the collector’s motives, he claims, “It is the anonymous snapshot’s immediacy, inherent honesty, and unstudied freedom from external influence that are the draw.… The personal can therefore become impersonal.” Ah, but, then again, “a collector can have a subjective interest in a snapshot’s narrative content as a surrogate for life experiences. Thus the personal remains personal, if you will.” Like novels and scandal sheets, snapshots are windows, however smeary, into other lives. Jackson goes on to name, in four broad columns of print, 107 dealers, fellow-collectors, and flea-market merchandisers who assisted his macabre traffic in silver-based shadows. For those who care, he confides that a leading bazaar for these souvenirs of the pre-digital age is eBay.
Aftermaths
NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE FLOOD: Photographs by Robert Polidori, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 19–December 10, 2006.
AFTER THE FLOOD, by Robert Polidori, with an introduction by Jeff L. Rosenheim. 333 pp. Steidl, 2006.
AFTERMATH, by Joel Meyerowitz. 349 pp. Phaidon, 2006.
Twenty-four chromogenic prints each measuring three by five feet: the exhibition begins with six of them in the Metropolitan’s Tisch Galleries, the long upstairs corridor customarily devoted to etchings, drawings, and photographs, and continues, after two left turns, in the modest spaces of the Howard Gilman Gallery. The show concerns the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s ruinous pass over New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as recorded by the distinguished architectural photographer Robert Polidori in four visits between September 2005 and April 2006; it is being attended, to judge from the day this viewer was present, by more youthful African-Americans than usually make their way into the Met. Katrina, as the disaster is called for short, was a black disaster, exposing the black poverty that, dwelling in the low-lying areas of the metropolis, stayed out of the view of the tourists who flocked to Bourbon Street for a taste of Cajun cuisine and old-fashioned jazz, or who admired the fluted columns and iron lace of the gently moldering Garden District, or who were unthriftily prepared to laisser le bon temps rouler at Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl. Good times were what the city had to sell, trading on its racy past as a Francophone southern port. Founded in 1718, it flirted from the start with sea level, as the surging Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain hung over its shoulder; like Los Angeles on its fault line, and New York City in its congestion, it borrowed glamour from a hypothetical precariousness. Not merely hypothetical, Katrina proved: 160,000 homes were swamped, and, to quote Jeff L. Rosenheim’s succinct introduction to Polidori’s massive album After the Flood, “street after street, block after block, from Chalmette and New Orleans East to the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview, Metairie, and Gentilly (where Polidori lived as a teenager),” added up to “widespread urban ruin” and “community disintegration.” Many thousands of the displaced have still not returned; an estimated two hundred thousand never will. A major American city was depopulated with a suddenness and thoroughness war itself could not top.
The event was mostly just news, like tornadoes in Kansas and mudslides near Malibu, to the rest of us; Polidori’s big prints take us there with a lofty dispassion and even focus. Eerily, no human beings are present in the photographs, so they have the uncanny stillness of Piranesi carceri, of Richard Estes’s glittering cityscapes, of Egyptian tombs unsealed after millennia.1 The circumstances in which these impassive exposures were made were not studio-ideal; there was no electricity in most of the interiors, and, to quote Rosenheim again:
When Polidori arrived in New Orleans on September 20 … 80% of the city was still under water. The temperature was close to 90° F and the smell of rotting flesh and food was putrid. Downed electric cables draped the streets and sidewalks. Toppled live oaks lay like fallen colossi, except there was no grandeur to the scene, just despair. Most traffic lights and streetlamps had long stopped working, and exhausted relief crews were still discovering and collecting the dead.
But Polidori, with the same devotion that led him to explore the abandoned and radioactive apartments, schoolrooms, hospitals, machinery, and nuclear-power facilities around Chernobyl (Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, published by Steidl in 2003), persisted, employing in some electricity-less interiors film exposures that ran into the minutes. In the haunting Chernobyl book, he wrote in a terse afterword, “I felt personally compelled to confront and witness this ongoing tragedy that no ritual can heal.” In New Orleans, he dealt not with invisible radioactivity but with a city like, he has said in an interview, “a decomposing body”; photographs taken six months after the hurricane still show scant signs of cleanup, reclamation, and recovery.
Polidori, 5417 Marigny Street, 2006. Chromogenic print. (Photo Credit Ill.38)
The first photograph in the show, Industrial Canal Breach, Reynes Street, presents, under a powder-blue September sky, water flowing between banks of washed-up lumber,
insulation, and overturned automobiles. Automobiles, those stolid American necessities, turn out to be susceptible and rather comically buoyant in a flood; the second photo, 2600 Block of Munster Boulevard, captures two of them with their rear ends elevated, like a pair of saucy chorus girls, in a row of brick bungalows. In the full tide of Polidori’s 333-page album After the Flood, ruined automobiles—upended, overturned, mud-filled, pinched beneath buildings, caught up on fences, buried beneath lumber and sea straw, mashed in mock copulation one against another—are as prominent as fallen trees and skewed ranch houses separated from their cement-block foundations. 2732 Orleans Avenue, the jacket photo of the album, shows an intact white coupe parked at an angle before an exiguous but apparently unharmed two-family house; the subtle message of the picture, clearer in the blowup at the Met, lies in the horizontal lines of dirt on the car’s chassis, marking the gradual recession of the waters.
