The State Of The Art

IN THE 20th CENTURY, photography has take over from painting and sculpture as the dominant form of representational art. Released from the strictures of realistic representation by the unmatchable accuracy of the camera, the traditional forms of art have plunged into abstraction. Photography meanwhile, has developed into a sophisticated medium for the recreation of the directly observed world.

When the first photographers aspired to art in the 19th century, they were profoundly disturbed by the camera's sharp and indiscriminating eye. As a result, they tried to make photographs that resembled paintings. Using classical, posed subject matter (half-draped nudes by a mountain stream and the like), they manipulated the photographic process to produce fuzzy, vaguely romantic images. After World War I, art photographers finally began to come to terms with the nature of their medium. Photographers such as Steiglitz and Strand discovered the artistic possibilities of sharp focus and modern subject matter. Their approach was formal, carefully--considered, composed and crafted. This style reached its peak in the 40's with the work of Edward Weston. Weston photographed mainly nudes, still lifes and landscapes, emphasizing the photograph's wide, tonal scale and capacity to render diamond-sharp details.

But the snapshot was a movement away from Weston. Weston's genius and stylistic fulfillment was such that, like T.S. Eliot in modern poetry, his influence probably did more to stultify than to stimulate new development in photography. When the photographic reaction to Weston came, it was radical--where Weston's images were classically composed, the new snapshot photography has a haphazard look. Where Weston photographed close friends and nature, snapshooters concentrate on man in the urban landscape. Weston worked n almost total isolation from the influence of mass culture--the new wave of photography is highly conscious of the medium's role in a larger society.

STRUCTURED AS AN extended essay on the relation between the amateur snapshot and the work of serious photographers. The Snap Shot also offers a wide view of the present state of photographic art. Included are works from established names, such as Robert Frank and Lee Freidlander and from the less well-known but increasingly important photographers such as Nancy Rexroth. Despite important differences in method and sensibility, all strive to snatch meaningful fragments of modern life. Quickly seen and quickly taken, the snapshot is a glimpse of a fast-moving society. It represents a new approach to reality in that it does not separate the main focus of attention from its context. A different form of artistic decision making is involved; subjects are not stripped from their surrounding chaos, but seen in relation to it. The photographs attempts to bring artistic meaning to the commonplace Gas stations, cars, and telephone booths rather than mountain and desert landscapes are common subjects. The snapshot tries to reflect urban sprawl; if the images seems tawdry and disorganized it is because their subject is, too.

Photography is foremost a window on the world. The photographer's two most creative decisions involve the framing of that window and the timing of the camera's shutter which permanently freezes the window's view. For the snapshot photographer, framing involves an attempt to capture a scene's ambience, rather than an attempt at strong composition. None of the photographers in The Snapshot crop their images; incongruities are as important as congruities. In one of the essays which stud the book, Tod Papageorge writes of his efforts to capture "superficialities." He wants to reveal truths not by grabbing moments of surpassing profundity, but through moments representative of the experience of everyday life. When this sensibility turns its attention to humanity, a side strikingly different from that examined by previous art is revealed.

EMMET GOWIN in his family portraits does not look to characterize a specific family, but rather to characterize the sprawl and variety of family life. Figures at both ends of the frame are cut off and those within are arranged haphazardly. Each is involved in his own world, not the photographer's. A baby near the foreground is blurred by motion; most of the others seem lost in contemplation and stare blankly in different directions. Yet there is a unity: the paradoxical combination of wide diversity of attention and easy physical proximity, make the photograph an unmistakeable account of a family, not of individuals.

Tod Papageorge similarly shows most of the people in his images intent on something other than himself. His photographs of seas of fans at a ball game, all intent upon the game, gives us a sneaky opportunity to examine the varieties of humanity without the danger of being observed. The snapshot style of photography is harshly unforgiving--its picture of humanity reveals all the tedious banality of everyday man. Every wrinkle, every paunch and every over-made-up face is starkly immortalized. When the snapshot does confront its subject, its look is electric. The nakedness with which people's eyes reveal their often distasteful natures comes as a shock to the viewer. Herein lies one of snapshot photography's greatest pitfalls, however. At its best, the style is revealing of humanity in day to day existence, but at its worst, it seeks out human ugliness for sheer shock value. None of the photographs in The Snapshot are representative of this trend, but it is one which constantly recurs in amateur photography.

FOR MOST OF the photographers in The Snapshot, time is fleeting and each image is an instantaneous moment within it. Gary Winogrand is a master of capturing the telling moment when human interaction is at its most explicit. Sometimes the result is too neat--one photograph is made by the simple gimmick of two men frozen in the similar act of pointing at the same unseen object. Others strike to the heart of interrelationships. One features the taut confrontation of mother and son on a city street. The kid's whining defiance and his mother's tired implorings cry out from the surface of the page. Only two photographers in the book are not interested in the instantaneousness of the present, Nancy Rexroth and Wehdy Snyder-MacNeil. Rexroth creates images out of the past, out of the distortions of memory. Using a $1.50 camera, her photographs are strangely fuzzy and distorted. However, the early photography--it intensifies rather than diffuses the image's impact. Mysterious, surrealistic and luminescent, her work is not the product of the physical eye, but the eye of memory. MacNeil is interested in the past as a "pre-history" to the present. She sets family snapshots from her subjects' earlier years next to her own portrait of the subject to give unusual insight into the chronological progression of an individual from youth to the present.

The snapshot photographer's greatest fault is that in his obsession with the ordinary and commonplace, he often forgets that he must not only portray, but also reveal. To have impact, the photographer must reveal truths about everyday life that we don't normally recognize. Without such revelation, the images are flat, dull and lifeless. Bill Zulpo-Dane's photo-postcards are faithful portrayals of places he has visited, but as photographs, they are excruciatingly dull.

The snapshot's dominance of modern photography is probably near an end. Its confused reflection of a confused world was and is effective, but as the world changes, so must its art. In their very essence snapshots are temporary, only flashes of civilization, which feels constantly undermined by the rapidity of change. Still, certain commitments never change. Photographers will always share Emmet Gowin's commitment to visual truth: "For me, problem is always to find the shape of the gesture, the feeling of space, a light, which holds again a sense of touching reality."