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Geoffrey Batchen

SNAPSHOTS

Art history and the ethnographic turn

This paper is about art history’s worst nightmare – boring pictures. This is the onlypossible description of the vast majority of photographic images, which tend to bepredictable, conservative, and repetitive in both form and content. As a consequence, theydo not easily fit into an art historical narrative still anxiously, insecurely, focused onoriginality, innovation, and individualism. The study of photography thus represents aserious problem for the practice of art history, just as, say, the snapshot represents a seriousproblem for the history of photography. How should one go about writing a history for aninfinity of generic snapshots? What historical rationale should one adopt when valuejudgments no longer seem to be relevant elements of the historical process? Hal Foster hasworried aloud about the ‘‘ethnographic turn’’ he says is involved in the displacement ofart history by visual culture, a concern that seems to focus on the relativism he associateswith an anthropological model of historical practice. Through an examination of theproblem of writing a history for the snapshot photograph, the paper addresses the otheringof art history that the ‘‘ethnographic turn’’ apparently entails by proposing yet anotherkind of historical model.

This essay is about art history’s worst nightmare: boring pictures. I’m speaking, ofcourse, about snapshots, that most ubiquitous and familiar of photographic genres. Iwant to address the problem of writing a history for the snapshot, a problemgenerated by the difficulty of deciding what to put in and what to leave out; that is, oncoming up with a rationale on which to base value judgments, a key element oftraditional art historical practice. On a number of levels, snapshots resist such apractice. But then, so does photography in general. In that sense, it could be said thatsnapshots are to the history of photography as photography is to the history of art;each represents a significant threat to the stability of its host discipline. Some havedescribed this threat in terms of an ‘‘ethnographic turn’’ and worry about the adventof a cultural relativism in which the value judgments necessary to art history willdisappear. Although focused on snapshots, my paper is, therefore, also about themethodological questions that arise when art history is forced to confront the spectralpresence of its other.

A little girl stands in a doorway, dressed in a coat that almost reaches the ground.Despite her small stature, she looks straight into my eyes from the dead center of thepicture plane, a directness of gaze made possible by the photographer (her mother orfather?) having kneeled on a lower step to take the picture. Behind her, reflected inthe rectangular panes of a glass door, is the tangled landscape of tree trunks andbranches that she can see behind me (figure 1).

Photographies Vol. 1, No. 2, September 2008, pp. 121–142

ISSN 1754-0763 print/ISSN 1754-0771 online � 2008 Taylor & Francis

http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/17540760802284398

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A husband and wife (or so it seems) stand in a garden, he in front of her, but withher hands poking through beneath his armpits to grasp his wrists. Her blue dressprovides a slash of color in an otherwise drab scene, with much of the foreground ofthe picture cast in deep shadow. He cocks his head with a wry smile while she peers atus intensely over his shoulder, offering a contrast of looks that belies the lightness ofthis little moment of conjugal play-acting (figure 2).

A young woman in a wide-brimmed hat looks away from us across the water atsomething blurred on the distant horizon line; it can only be the Statue of Liberty.True to the illogic of photography, she towers over the famous monument (so much

FIGURE 1 Unknown, untitled (Little girl on porch), ca. 1943–44, Gelatin silver print, 4L63 in. Gift

of Frank Maresca, 2002. Collection of the Newark Museum. 2002.59.119.

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for the realism of the camera image). But her own figure is equally threatened by twogigantic, dark fingers that have strayed across the lens during exposure and are nowflattened against the left side of the picture. The end result is an impossiblecomposition made plausible only by its photographicness (figure 3).

They are, of course, all family snapshots, three more or less arbitrarily chosenexamples from an endless torrent of similar kinds of pictures. It’s been said thatAmericans alone take about 550 snapshots per second, a statistic that, however it hasbeen concocted, suggests that the taking of such photographs might best be regardedas a neurosis rather than a pleasure. Why, then, do we take such pictures? And whatare we to make of them now? Most pressing – speaking as a professional photo-historian – is the question of how we are to write a history for such a practice. Whatshould a history about the snapshot look like, be like, sound like?

Despite the ubiquity of family snapshots as a genre, they barely appear in moststandard histories of photography. The reasons are obvious: most snapshots arecloyingly sentimental in content and repetitively uncreative as pictures, having little

FIGURE 2 Unknown, untitled (Standing couple), ca. 1940–49, Gelatin silver print hand-colored with

Marshall’s paints, 567 in. Gift of Frank Maresca, 2002. Collection of the Newark Museum. 2002.59.113.

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value in the marketplace of either ideas or commodities. For all these reasons, theydon’t easily fit into a historical narrative still anxiously, insecurely, focused onoriginality, innovation, and individualism.

But perhaps we should turn this problem around and look at it from the otherside: the snapshot, precisely because this is the most numerous and popular ofphotographic forms, represents an interpretive problem absolutely central to anyambitious scholarship devoted to the history of photography. Oblivious to the artisticprejudices that still guide much of that scholarship, family photographs challenge us tofind another way of talking about photography, a way that can somehow account forthe determined banality of these, and indeed most other, photographic pictures.

FIGURE 3 Unknown, untitled (Woman and Statue of Liberty), ca. 1920–25, Gelatin silver print,

4J62 9/16 in. Gift of Frank Maresca, 2002. Collection of the Newark Museum. 2002.59.17.

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But to find that ‘‘other way’’ we are first going to have to displace, or at leastcomplicate, existing models of writing about the history of photography. We mightstart this process by acknowledging that, ever since photography’s invention wasannounced in 1839, scholars have struggled to find an appropriate way to write ahistory for it. In the nineteenth century these efforts tended to be driven by priorityand nationalist claims or were organized around a chronological account of technicalimprovements. The first histories of photographic images did not appear until theearly twentieth century, usually in the form of photographer’s biographies.

An art history of photography was written by Beaumont Newhall in the 1930s,and this was soon supplemented by similar accounts based on private and museumcollections.1 These accounts established a coherently linear narrative occupied by acanon of photographic artists and master works drawn almost exclusively fromEurope and the United States. Incidentally, although Newhall’s pioneering work didinclude a number of vernacular photographs among its reproductions, no snapshotswere among them.

‘‘A History’’ soon became ‘‘The History’’ and this has meant that a modernist arthistorical discourse, with its narrow emphasis on avant-garde practice and aestheticsremained the dominant way of talking about photography’s history throughout thetwentieth century, whether this ‘‘talk’’ took the form of books or exhibitions.2 Oneresult has been that photography – a sprawling cultural phenomenon inhabitingvirtually every aspect of modern life: from birth to death, from sex to war, fromatoms to planets, from commerce to art – is consistently left out of its own history(for only a few, select photographs qualify for inclusion in an art history of themedium).

But it also means that photography’s history is often still made to obey the lookand basic organizing principles of art history. There are exceptions of course, but ingeneral the art history of photography celebrates singular achievements and theirmoment of origin, so that even objects having multiple manifestations and meaningsare treated as unique and individual events. Among other effects, repeating theseprinciples in publications and exhibitions devoted to photography’s history tends torepress those attributes that make photography such a distinctive element of modernculture – for example, the reproducibility of the photograph and therefore theability of any particular image to come in a variety of looks, sizes, and formats; thecomplication of authorship and origin that results; and the enmeshing ofphotographic practice within the tawdry commerce of consumer capitalism andmass production.

Moreover, most photographs are actually about conformity, not innovation orsubversion. So they don’t readily fit the usual art historical narratives. If you examinecartes-de-visite portraits or snapshots or wedding pictures, to name just a few ofphotography’s many neglected genres, you’ll discover that each example captures aunique pose, even if that pose obediently repeats a million other, very similar poses.They are all the same, but they are all also just slightly different from each other. Ifwe’re going to consider all of photography in its history, we will need to develop away to deal with this visual and political economy of ‘‘same but different.’’ Certainlywe must, as Michel Foucault says, ‘‘eliminate certain ill-considered oppositions …the opposition between average forms of knowledge (representing its

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everyday mediocrity) and deviant forms (which manifest the singularity or solitudeof genius)’’.3

Of course there’s an assumption held by those who propagate an art history ofphotography that by privileging singular achievements and avant-garde photographicpractice in the medium’s history, one is providing a model (both artistic and social/political) for similarly transgressive action in the present. It’s a comforting illusion,but I’m afraid I’m no longer convinced by this argument or this kind of historicalemphasis. A normative history that privileges avant-garde practice, even thosepractices that at some point contested the establishment of their own time, is still anormative history. It merely feeds an art world economy for whom such dead avant-gardes are only so many commodities, intellectual and otherwise. What I’msuggesting here is that we need an avant-garde approach to history, not anotherobedient history of the avant-garde.

To reiterate: the problem I have with our existing, standard histories ofphotography is not just a matter of content (of what’s included or excluded from thathistory). My concern is with the mode of historical discourse itself, and with theconceptual infrastructure on which this history is built.

Photography was once described by Roland Barthes as ‘‘an anthropologicalrevolution in man’s history’’, as a ‘‘truly unprecedented’’ type of consciousness.4

‘‘It is the advent of the Photograph’’, he postulated, ‘‘which divides the history of theworld.’’5 Writing a history for something that itself divides history is obviously acrucial, even if daunting, task. And yet photography’s variety and self-effacingubiquity have also made it an elusive historical entity, defying traditionalinterpretative or narrative structures. How, after all, do you go about presenting ahistory of a ‘‘consciousness’’? How do you evoke something as momentous as an‘‘anthropological revolution’’?

How do you write a history for something that escapes easy definition, has nodiscernable boundaries, and operates on the principle of reflection (how, for example,do you separate a photograph from what it’s of or from the unfolding context of itsreception)? How do you invent a voice (or voices) for this history that can speak tophotography’s emotional effects as well as its physical and formal characteristics andeconomic and political ramifications? How can you speak of and from a local positionand yet encompass photography’s global reach and its multiple expressions of culturaldifference? These questions collectively constitute the problem that now faces us; theneed for a systemic transformation of the way the history of photography isrepresented such that this history can, for the first time, engage with photography inall of its many aspects and manifestations.

This transformation has, in fact, already begun, as evidenced by the publicationsof a new generation of inter-disciplinary scholars who take for granted thatphotography is predominately a vernacular practice and has always been a globalexperience. I’m thinking of writers on photography as various as Marina Warner andJennifer Tucker, Elspeth Brown and Christopher Pinney, Carol Williams and MarthaLangford, Patricia Johnston and Robin Kelsey, Shawn Michelle Smith and CarolMavor, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Elizabeth Edwards, to name only a few of the moreprominent.6 Heterogeneous by inclination, these scholars have combined elements ofart history and cultural studies with philosophy, women’s studies, anthropology,

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American studies, literature, and sociology, among other interpretive models. Theyaddress themselves to commercial and ordinary photographs rather than just to artobjects, and tend to focus on issues like race, sexuality, power and everydayexperience – they focus, in other words, on photography’s relationship to life.

Many in this group came of intellectual age during the 1980s, when postmodernskepticism about the nature of knowledge and truth was at its height. But they haveequally emerged from the ongoing dissension that in North America has come to becalled ‘‘Visual Culture’’. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has pointed out, this combinationof words seems to simultaneously refer to an object of study, a mode of analysis and anew academic discipline.7 However it’s the very fact that Visual Culture appears to be aphenomenon encompassing methodological, institutional, and archaeological ambitionsthat makes it such a challenging proposition; the very fact that it escapes definition aseither one thing or another is the source of its potential political import.

However one chooses to understand it, this term ‘‘Visual Culture’’ at the leastimplies the possibility of inventing different kinds of historical voices in order to askdifferent kinds of historical questions. Many scholars have been drawn, for example,to the type of critical analysis proposed by Irit Rogoff, an analysis that, she suggests,should speak to, rather than about, a given object of study.8 This might be taken tomean that one’s mode of analysis be driven by the specific qualities of the object beingdiscussed (and that therefore Visual Culture will entail many different types ofdiscourse, not just one).

In my own case, it has, for example, encouraged a shift of analytical emphasisfrom the producers of photographs to their owners, offering the possibility of ahistory of the reception of photographs. Photography thereby becomes a dynamicmode of apprehension rather than a series of static pictures. Similarly, it hasencouraged the study of photographic practices or genres rather than individualphotographers. This history necessarily features practices involving collective handsand/or now-unknown makers (many of them women), thereby displacing thebiographical and phallocentric bias of most current photographic histories.9 Rogoff’sproposal also implies the deployment of a self-consciously subjective or evenautobiographical voice, a move that comes with its own incipient dangers (althoughwriters from James Agee and Roland Barthes to Rebecca Solnit and Helen Ennis haveall managed to produce powerful texts about photography by this means).10

But principal among Visual Culture’s dangers, apparently, is its affinity with‘‘anthropological discourse’’ and therefore with an analytical relativism that erasescultural and temporal specificities. Or so proposes Hal Foster, in a series of essayspublished in the art journal October in the 1990s. Comparing art history to ‘‘visualculture’’ in 1996, Foster argued that ‘‘the shift from history to culture intimates ashift, inadvertent or otherwise, to anthropology as a guardian discourse’’.11

Suggesting that ‘‘visual culture’’ is the discursive equivalent of the internet in theway it reduces the material specificity of pictures to a disembodied and generic arrayof ‘‘images’’, he describes its practitioners as engaged in ‘‘tabulations of imagesdeemed more or less equal in value’’. The implication is that the kind of aesthetic orintellectual judgments that would and should distinguish a snapshot from, say, an artphotograph by Garry Winogrand will be set aside by those advocating Visual Culture.For Foster, this is a basic anthropological move, for apparently ‘‘in the ethnographic

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model one moves horizontally from site to site, across social space’’, a movementthat, he suggests, may promote something he calls ‘‘a posthistorical reduction’’.12

Foster wrote this essay at about the same time as he was publishing another, ‘‘TheArtist as Ethnographer’’, where he similarly worried about both the ‘‘appropriation ofthe other’’ and ‘‘the othering of the self’’ in contemporary art and criticism.13 Inthese cases, he suggested, the ethnographic approach ‘‘can become a gambit, aninsider game that renders the institution not more open and public but more hermeticand narcissistic, a place for initiates only where a contemptuous criticality isrehearsed’’.14 Although he includes critics and historians among those engaged in this‘‘ethnographic turn’’, all the examples he discusses here are artists, such as theinstallation artist Fred Wilson. This emphasis itself betrays the ethnographic basis ofFoster’s own art history, which specializes in speaking about and for artists as astrange, lost tribe of creative mavericks operating on the margins of everyday culture.However, as Matthew Rampley has pointed out, the ‘‘ethnographic turn’’ identifiedby Foster as a recent, troubling development has in fact been an aspect of art historysince its beginnings, with the defining of cultural alterity a driving logic behind thework on aesthetics of Kant, Hegel, Semper, Riegl, and most of the other foundingfigures of the discipline.15

Nevertheless it’s certainly true that the recent emergence into visibility of a vastnew field of photographic practices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America has broughtwith it a renewed interest in the anthropological perspective on cultural activity.Anthropology has traditionally looked at such activity as something that has utilitarianvalue. Images are created for some purpose. Images do things. They are social objects,not simply aesthetic ones. They are meaningful only when seen in relationship to a widersocial network of beliefs and practices, economies and exchanges. As a consequence, Iwould argue that this view has so far enhanced, rather than reduced, an emphasis on thespecificity of social context, and a sensitivity to the complications, ethical and otherwise,of writing in the face of difference. In short, the new generation of photographicscholars takes for granted that there are many photographies, not just one.

Although Foster worries about the prevalence of the ‘‘disembodied image’’within Visual Culture, scholars trained as anthropologists who consistently writeabout photography, such as Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Pinney, have in factinsisted on a close attention to the materiality of their objects of study. Edwards, forexample, has written about the degree to which photographs are sometimes ‘‘held,caressed, stroked, sung to’’ within Australian Aboriginal communities, bringing soundand touch as well as sight into her analysis of their photographic experience.16

Pinney adopts the perspective of the participant observer in his work aboutphotography in central India, insisting on what he calls ‘‘the role of photography insocial relations; a photograph’s role as memorial; and the materiality of images’’.Mimicking a first-person documentary voiceover, he argues in a more recent essaythat in current anthropological scholarship ‘‘subjectivity equals the new objectivity’’,thus opening this sort of scholarship to the self-reflexive rhetorical devices of thehistorical novel.17

Although he pays lip service to difference in his writing, Foster’s mostrecent book, Art since 1900, was notable for its refusal to countenance, for example,different regional responses to modernity. There was no space in this history of

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twentieth-century art for an analysis of the specificity of Australian, Thai,Canadian, Nigerian, or Peruvian modernism, to name only a few neglectednational cultures, thereby eliminating the enabling confusion of this sort of culturaldiversity from the book’s master narrative.18 In this case, Foster was content tomaintain precisely the cozy Euro-American hegemony that Visual Culture aims tocontest.

But perhaps his fear of Visual Culture relates to difference at an even moreprofound level, for relativism can also be a way to cast radical doubt on what Fostertakes for granted in his own art criticism: what he calls ‘‘the intransigence of asexuality, an unconscious, or any substance that might exceed the historicallyspecific’’.19 It is hard to deny that the ‘‘ethnographic turn’’ in Visual Cultureencourages a skeptical attitude to the notion that there is ‘‘a sexuality’’ or ‘‘anunconscious’’ that somehow transcends the specificity of its historical circumstances.If there are many photographies, then, it follows, there can also potentially be manysexualities and even, perhaps, more than one unconscious.

So far, Foster’s concerns seem to be misplaced, self-interested, or simplymischievous, but they do at least raise this whole question of the politics of anydiscourse about visual images. It forces us to consider exactly what is at stake in thesearcane debates about definitions and specificity, voice and subject matter. The editorsof October rightly feel that art history itself is at risk here and for some reason want todefend it, thus reinforcing their own continuing alliance with ruling-class values andinterests.20

But it’s precisely because I feel that history does indeed matter, and that an arthistory of photography is now so inadequate to the task at hand, that I gravitate to thestill-open range of possibilities signified by Visual Culture. The words may beinadequate, but the desire for difference they represent is compelling. For me, then,Visual Culture promises, not an alternative to our current ways of understanding thehistory of photography, but an eruption within that history which threatens to totallytransform its existing parameters. In that sense, I believe that, as a way of talkingabout photography, and especially about vernacular, everyday genres of photographylike snapshots, the emerging field of Visual Culture remains ripe with all sorts ofinteresting possibilities.

This returns me to the problem with which I began my discussion, theproblem of devising a way of incorporating the snapshot genre into a history ofphotography. My first three examples come from a collection of about 500snapshots recently donated to New Jersey’s Newark Museum by Frank Maresca, adealer in contemporary folk art with a gallery in the Chelsea district of NewYork.21 The man obviously has an educated, quirky eye, for many of the picturesin his collection feature unexpected or multiple points of view (like the reflectionsin the door or the accidental juxtaposition of fingers, woman, and monument) aswell as poignantly unknowable narratives, racy sexual situations, or other elementsof unusual pictorial interest. For all these reasons, they’re not very representativeof family snapshots.

Or maybe they are? What would a representative sample of snapshots look like,anyway, and how would we go about choosing it? That’s exactly the historicaldilemma we’re trying to solve here.

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And we’re certainly not the first to try. After decades of neglect, there have beena surprising number of substantial publications and exhibitions dedicated to thesnapshot in recent years. And as you’ve already heard, we now even have art dealersdonating their collections of snapshots to art museums: art dealers collectingsnapshots? museums accepting donations of snapshots? books about snapshots? What’sgoing on here? Twenty years ago you couldn’t give snapshots away. So why thesudden interest?

Could this burst of activity be inspired by the possibility that this is a form ofphotography that is already safely a thing of the past? In effect, these variouspublications, several of them exhibition catalogues from major art museums, celebratethe snapshot even as they declare it dead (never has the etymological connectionbetween museum and mausoleum seemed so direct).22 Today, looking back from ourdigital age, it has to be conceded that snapshots are themselves historical objects,remnants of an earlier, industrial phase in modernity’s development. They speak of atime, not so long ago, when cameras still carried film and Kodak still dominated thephotography market. They speak of my youth, maybe even of the youth of ourmodern age. As I have suggested previously, the advent of digital technologies meansthat this kind of photography has now taken on an extra memorial role, ‘‘not of thesubjects it depicts, but of its own operation as a system of representation’’.23 Thissuffuses snapshots with the aesthetic appeal of a seductive melancholy, whatever theiractual age or the particularities of their subject matter. Certainly it’s hard now to seethese rectangles of gelatin silver or vivid color, with their white edges and glossysheen, except through a distorting haze of modernist nostalgia.

That said, snapshots are often full of useful information about the past; one canwell imagine social histories illustrated by snapshots, or even a social history of thesnapshot itself, tracing the founding of the Eastman Kodak company in 1888, andthe development of its cameras and marketing techniques. Urging women to becomethe family’s historian, Kodak aggressively associated the snapshot with memory andloss, and with specifically middle-class values and sentiments, and insisted thatphotography be regarded as an essential part of everyday life.24 This is certainly animportant story to tell. But surely it’s not the only one. It’s not the one, for example,that most of these recent publications have chosen to recount.

Two of the most prominent of these publications are Snapshots: The Photography ofEveryday Life, 1888 to the Present, issued by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Artin 1998, and Other Pictures, published in 2000 in conjunction with an exhibition ofsnapshots from the collection of Thomas Walther at the Metropolitan Museum of Artin New York.25 In both cases, their chosen pictures are presented with a minimum oftextual accompaniment, one image to a page, in no particular chronological order,like so many precious art objects. And why not? Isolated like this, removed from anysense of an original context, these pictures do become precious, even extraordinary.You flip from page to page, picture to picture, amazed at the luscious tones andformal invention of these otherwise ordinary photographs.

One looks as though it was taken by Man Ray, another by Rodchenko. Theyprove, so Walther claims in his written contribution to Other Pictures, ‘‘that thecamera can be an extension of genius in the hands of any one of us’’.26 Or,equally, they prove that an eye educated by art history can, if it wants to, find traces

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of avant-garde sensibility wherever it looks. Which is it? Are these publications atribute to the snapshot, or to the sharp eye of their collector/curator? Are theyexercises in photo-history, or just in art appreciation and pseudo-morphism? What dothese publications actually tell us about the snapshot as a cultural or socialphenomenon or even as a personal experience? Answer: very little.

What they do tell us quite a lot about is the continuing influence of a certain kindof art history on the study of photography. More particularly, they imply that themaking of value judgments – in Foster’s view an activity that separates art historyfrom Visual Culture – is an appropriate way to go about making sense of snapshots. Inpart, this assumption indicates the degree to which, thanks in part to the dominance ofthe October group over the past twenty years, the tropes of art criticism have come tobe identified with the practice of art history.27 Faced with a vast field of possiblechoices, both Walther and Nickel have decided that the best thing to do is pick out arelatively few interesting pictures from the multitude available, as if to make the casefor a parallel avant-garde population striving for pictorial innovation amongst usotherwise ordinary folk – snapshots as Outsider Art.

This approach, in which a handful of exceptional examples is asked to represent agenre otherwise infinite in number, is repeated in Photo Trouvee, an anthology of foundpictures published in France in 2006.28 Here we are presented with snapshot viewingas a kind of surrealist exercise, as if the subjective nature of the selection is itself areflection on the impossibility of the curatorial task. In the face of innumerablechoices, chance is apparently the only historical method that can properly representthis type of photograph. Once again, many of these pictures come to us replete witheffects probably unintended by their photographer: comedic accidents, doubleexposures, odd reflections, unexplained poses and gestures, and blurred situations.They’ve all been made by now unknown photographers in circumstances that can onlybe guessed at. Having been elevated to the status of folk art, they have also beentransformed here into something other than themselves: into memories withoutmemory, stories without storytellers; in short, into enigmas.

That doesn’t make them any less interesting as pictures. Or perhaps it’s only theirisolation, cut off from the visual cacophony of all the world’s other snapshots, that hasmade these pictures seem interesting. Consider another of these efforts to present thesnapshot to us, in this case an exhibition catalogue published in 2007 by the NationalGallery in Washington.29 In many ways, it’s the best publication on the snapshot thathas been produced to date, being well organized, written, and designed. It provides afour-essay social history of the snapshot, beautifully illustrated with bothadvertisements and period snapshots. It’s rare to find an approach that tries to putsnapshots into a specific context, designating the differences between those producedin 1920 and 1950. This book does so. And the pictures are fascinating and oftenextraordinary.

And there’s where the usual problem arises. This exhibition and book are basedon one private collection of 8000 snapshots (138 of which have been given to theNational Gallery in the usual quid pro quo arrangement). These snapshots have beenculled from, as you’ll remember, the 550 snapshots that are taken every second (thebook ventures a total number for 1977: 8.9 billion in the US alone). They were in factcollected by someone trained as an art historian and he has looked, naturally enough,

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for creative, unusual, and rare examples of the snapshot ‘‘art’’. However, as I’vealready suggested, the vast majority of snapshots are not rare or particularly creative;they’re mostly banal, repetitive in pictorial form, and conformist in social aspiration.Those snapshots (and therefore 99% of the genre) are not represented here.

In a sense, this book exemplifies the problem of presenting a history ofphotography within the confines of an art historical narrative or an art museum. Arepresentative history of the visual culture of photography has to acknowledge andaccount for boredom and ubiquity, the medium’s most abiding visual qualities. Butthe National Gallery of Art is not going to mount an exhibition devoted to boringpictures and is therefore constitutionally unable to present a representative history ofthe snapshot.

So in this book you have the odd juxtaposition of a textual social history (exceptfor the last chapter, which can’t stop itself from telling us all about the snapshot’sinfluence on high art) and illustrations that display untypical, exceptional examples, inmost cases removed from any sense of an original context and displaced from thepersonal intimacy that once animated them as keepsakes. At least the book is calledThe Art of the American Snapshot, an honest enough title. Now all we need is an actualhistory of the American snapshot, a history obsessed with life rather than art. But whatinstitution is going to take that task on, or has the resources of the National Gallery todo as nice a job as this?

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles perhaps? They’ve in fact already done it,having contributed their own publication on the snapshot in 2004. Titled Close toHome: An American Album, this catalogue shows us yet more snapshots plucked fromobscurity, reproduced in both color and black and white, printed at all sorts ofdifferent scales, with no regard for the original object or its context.30 Comparedwith the other publications, I find many of the Getty images to be not very compellingto look at, except as social documents of bygone eras (as records of clothing, cars,furniture, leisure activities, home life). Perhaps my relative disinterest in them aspictures is due to a contempt born of familiarity. For these particular snapshots dolook very much like the ones in my own shoebox; that is, they look like pictures ofnothing much. But they come to me without any of the twinges of recognition andmemory that give my own family pictures their continued vitality. They’re more orless representative of the form of the snapshot, but they lack those other qualities thatmake the snapshot matter as a social artifact. All I see here are some random visualresidues of someone else’s life, as if I’m being made privy to only one side of aconversation now fallen silent.

This imposed silence points to the real difficulty of writing about the snapshot.As soon as you pick one out from the herd for special attention, you kill the veryquality that makes it what it is. The Getty publication, speaking for all of them,embraces, even celebrates, this act of displacement: ‘‘disengaged from their functionas personal mementos, snapshots fascinate because they become open to new andvaried interpretations’’.31 Personal intimacy is replaced by voyeuristic speculation,thus making even the most formulaic image a thing of fascination. This invitation tospeculate, it is argued, restores the creative exchange between viewer andphotograph that has been otherwise lost in the transfer from family archive to artbook.

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Certainly the separation of any snapshot from its original contextual narrativemakes you concentrate on incidental details and on the contingent pictorial effects offraming and cropping (you are thereby forced to attend to the internal, formalelements of photographic picture-making, forgetting that this is only one aspect ofhow the meaning of a photograph is determined).32 All this allows these booksto successfully turn a private act into a public art. But this process also happens to be aconvenient way for each of these publications to avoid having to address itself to thespecific character of the snapshot as a genre of photography.

I would suggest that this character consists of at least two interlocking parts. Onthe one hand, we have a type of photographic image that, contrary to the impressionleft by most of these publications, tends to be predictable in content and conservativein style. On the other, these same, unexciting images are capable of inducing aphotographic experience that can be intensely individual, often emotional, sometimeseven painful. Here’s another of those conundrums: snapshots are dull pictures that wecan’t live without (remarkably, snapshots are a kind of picture one could both laughand cry over).

Any study of the snapshot worthy of the name must surely address itself to thedynamics of this contradiction (boring picture for me, moving picture for you) by wayof a theory of photographic reception. This means looking more closely at therelationship of the snapshot to a network of expectations and obligations extending faroutside the picture itself. In short, it will mean having to consider the snapshotphotograph as both a complex social device and a personal talisman, rather thansimply as a static art object.

Let’s return to our original three examples from the Maresca Collection. Theycould be said to exhibit many of the snapshot’s most common attributes. They’vebeen taken of friends and family members by amateur photographers with cheap hand-held cameras for the express purpose of producing a personal memento. As pictures,they combine humor and unrehearsed intimacy with a formality borrowed from aprofessional studio tradition. The subject (almost always a person) is usually placedfirmly in the center of the picture plane, looking directly at the camera, well awarethat they are posing for posterity’s sake.

We don’t know these people, and probably never will. But we can still imaginethe scenario that has led to these moments, for this is an experience we have allshared. The little girl has no doubt been coached by her parent/photographer (whohas in turn been coached by Kodak advertisements and perhaps even by his/her ownparents) to mimic a set of gestures and poses thought proper to such pictures.Through that mimicry they both express a desire (whether consciously or not) toconform to the looks and expectations of middle-class life. As a collective activity ofpicture-making, snapshots show the struggles of particular individuals to conform tothe social expectations, and visual tropes, of their sex and class; as I’ve alreadysuggested, everyone simultaneously wants to look like themselves and like everyoneelse – to be the same but (ever so slightly) different. Before all else, snapshots areodes to conformist individualism.

This visual conformity makes these sorts of photographs comfortingly familiar.They stitch both photographer and subject into a larger community of shared valuesand aspirations. Snapshots thereby work to reconcile personal and mass identity. But

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this social imperative still doesn’t entirely explain why we find our own snapshots tobe so moving, given their otherwise low-brow aesthetic qualities.

Maybe we have to ask whether the relative lack of imagination shown in thesesorts of photographs in fact shifts the burden of imaginative thought from the artistand subject, where historians usually seek it, to the viewer, who is invited by suchpictures to see much more than meets the eye.33 Certainly, when I examine asnapshot of a loved one, I see how they once looked, but I also project how I feelabout that person onto the picture. The snapshot conjures how they were then and howI am now, in the same all-encompassing look.

If we were to cast our eyes over all the 500 snapshots from the MarescaCollection, we might notice that some of them come to us somewhat damaged; over

FIGURE 4 Unknown, untitled (‘‘Myself Lyle Egan – best friend’’), ca. 1930s, Gelatin silver print,

43=8|23=4 in. Collection of the author.

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the years they’ve been stained, weathered, and scarred. One of them even has a creaseall the way across it (and yet someone still treasured this photograph enough to keepit). It’s a reminder that snapshots could potentially be reproduced in large numbersbut in reality they are often unique images. Such deformities are also a reminder thatthese pictures were once regularly touched by their original owners. They weretouched, fingered, fondled, turned over, perhaps written on or read (figure 4), andthen, in many cases, placed in albums designed expressly for the purpose. Thesealbums were a vehicle for storytelling, often conveying a bio-epic starring the makerof the album (who we know, from ink captions, only as ‘‘me’’).34 Roughlychronological, this narrative usually located its principal actor within a web of familialand social events and settings, allowing the depiction of an idealized life in pictorialform (snapshots rarely capture moments of tension or unhappiness).

Each double page might present a different version of the same basic narcissisticstory (me at the beach with my friends, me at my birthday party, me on holiday inParis, my friends looking at me as I take their photograph). In such narratives, therelationship of one photograph to the next is a crucial element, allowing for a relayeffect that binds a given ensemble together in coherent diegesis (many of thesepictures that we now see in isolation in art books might have looked a lot less strangewhen seen in their original company).35 The current anonymity of this interlocutor isa further reminder that the audience for this pictorial narrative was intended to be aclose circle of family and friends, probably the same group featured in thephotographs. In other words, the people looking at these snapshots knew theirsubjects by name (and maybe they even took some or all of the snapshots themselves).

Snapshots are touchable objects but they are also often prompts for speech. Thesubjects of these snapshots were once named aloud, talked over, joked about, libeledand ridiculed, reinterpreted and contested in oral exchange.36 Snapshots were rarelycontemplated in respectful silence and nor should they be now. But what is a snapshotwhen it has been rendered mute? What do they have to say to us now, when all thisanimating chatter has died down and we are left with only its husk, with just theprompt itself? What else do found snapshots have to tell us, beyond the sad fact oftheir own death as meaningful personal artifacts?

Well, they might also be regarded as a collective declaration of faith in the midstof an increasingly skeptical, secular world. Like every photograph, the snapshot is anindexical trace of the presence of its subject, a trace that both confirms the reality ofexistence and remembers it, potentially surviving as a fragile talisman of that existenceeven after its subject has passed on. It is the need to provide witness to this existence– to declare ‘‘I was here!’’ in visual terms – that surely drives us to keep onphotographing, rather than the intrinsic qualities of the picture that results.

Pierre Bourdieu’s 1965 sociological study of what he called a ‘‘middle-brow art’’described the making of family snapshot albums as a ‘‘ritual of integration’’ that enactsa ‘‘normalizing function’’ with all the ‘‘clarity of a faithfully visited gravestone’’.37

Among other things, he points out that family snapshots can be taken with any sort ofcamera, and that, equally, a snapshot camera can take a variety of kinds of picture;what makes a snapshot a snapshot is its function, not its pictorial qualities, and thisfunction is determined by the network of social relationships of which it is a part. Heunderlines the ethnographic perspective he brings to his analysis by explicitly

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comparing family snapshots to ‘‘churinga, those objects of decorated wood or stonethat represent the physical body of a particular ancestor, which, amongst the Aranda,each generation solemnly presents to the living person held to be the reincarnation ofthat ancestor, and which are periodically brought out for inspection and reverence’’.38

Bourdieu underlines the primal quality of our relationship to snapshots byreferring us to what, for him, must have seemed the most primitive of fetish objects,those used by Australia’s Aborigines. The comparison might seem inappropriatetoday, but who could deny the power of the relationship he’s trying to describe?Often said to be the first thing we would rescue from a burning building, the snapshotis a type of photograph that is only rarely looked at and then usually in the mostprivate and domestic of circumstances, almost always framed by inventivereminiscence and mixed emotions. We have to have them (to know we have them),but we don’t necessarily have to see them. The irony is that we take photographs inorder to deny the possibility of death, to stop time in its tracks and us with it. But thatvery same photograph, by placing us indisputably in the past, is itself a kind of mini-death sentence, a prediction of our ultimate demise at some future time. It certifiestimes past and time’s inevitable passing. Every snapshot, no matter what its subjectmatter, embodies this paradoxical message, speaking simultaneously of life and death.

This is a theme addressed at length in Roland Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida,in many ways the exemplary text for those interested in the kind of writing that isnow called Visual Culture. This influential essay – part autobiographical novel, partphilosophical rumination – is also an account of photography in which the snapshotexperience is, for once, given a central role. But it’s how Barthes chooses to talk aboutthis experience that is worth noting.

I have argued elsewhere that Camera Lucida, with its carefully calibrated choice ofillustrations, its peculiar temporal convolutions, its supplementary logic, binaryterms, and inverted layout (a layout in fact borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s 1931‘‘Little History of Photography’’), offers an historical view of photography that isdeliberately structured like a photograph.39 In short, the book seeks to tell us certainthings about photography by itself becoming photographic, by giving us a specificallyphotographic experience.

Like Benjamin before him, Barthes burrows into the very flesh of photography byallowing his text to take on many of its most salient attributes, such as the playbetween negative and positive that is at the heart of most photographic practices. Putinto motion, these attributes then become the structuring principles of his writing. Bythis means his little book is able to directly engage photography’s dissemination andreception as well as its production, encompassing all of its many aspects, whethervisible (images and practices) or invisible (effects and experiences). Abandoningchronology as an organizing principle, he looks primarily at ordinary photographs, ratherthan masterworks, opening up the entire field of photography for examination andeschewing any reliance on art historical prejudices. Aiming only to be representative,rather than comprehensive, Barthes even proffers the possibility of a history based on justone (unseen) photograph. In short, the analytical approach demonstrated by Camera Lucidaproduces a history that is actually about photography, not just of photographs.

Barthes talks, for example, in very personal, emotive tones about the memoriesof his deceased mother conjured by his encounter with a single, worn photograph of

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her. Although he describes this family photograph in detail, its ‘‘corners blunted fromhaving been pasted into an album, the sepia print … faded’’, he nevertheless refusesto reproduce it for us.40 It’s a clever move, because the absent presence of the so-called Winter Garden photograph of his mother is a void into which every reader thenprojects their own snapshot of a loved one.

Barthes thus does something that none of these other histories of the snapshothas dared to do – he describes the essential snapshot, but does not make it visible,demanding that we do that work for him in our mind’s eye. As a consequence,infinity and zero – every snapshot ever taken and this evoked, but forever absentedone – are made to turn in on each other without pause. In this manner, Barthesprovides a textual space, an imaginary vortex, into which the entire history of thesnapshot can be funneled without a single picture from that history having to bedisplaced into the public realm and thereby changed into something other thanitself.

Even 28 years after his death, Barthes’s ghost continues to haunt ourunderstanding of photography, even as the unruly, peculiar qualities of thephotographic experience similarly torment the practice of art history. My briefethnography of the snapshot has shown that traditional, conservative art history, of,say, the sort practiced by Hal Foster, is patently inadequate to the complexities of thisgenre of photography, or even to photography in general. Using Camera Lucida as apossible model for another mode of historical accounting, I have proposed we adopt asimilar sort of analytical oscillation to the one found there, a back and forth betweenwhatever orphaned examples of snapshot culture we encounter in the world and ourown prized photographic reliquaries, between cliche and sublimity, sameness anddifference, truth and fiction, public and private, infinity and zero, without lettingeither term ever rest on its laurels. For it is surely only here, here within the unstablespacing of this kind of oscillation, that a truly photographic history for the snapshotcan plausibly be staged.

Notes

Versions of this essay are also being published in Japanese in Photographers’ Gallery Press(2008) and in French in Etudes Photographiques (2008). Some paragraphs were firstpublished in ‘Dividing History,’ Source 52 (September 2007): 22–25.

1 The first edition of Newhall’s history was issued as an exhibition catalogue by theMuseum of Modern Art in New York in 1937, under the title Photography 1839–1937. A second edition, almost identical to the first, was then published asPhotography: A Short Critical History. It is worth noting that the Museum of ModernArt presented an exhibition on the snapshot in 1944, publishing a catalogue titledThe American Snapshot: An Exhibition of the Folk Art of the Camera, with an essay on‘‘The American Snapshot’’ by Willard D. Morgan. Thanks go to Lynn Berger forbringing my attention to this publication.

2 The third edition of Newhall’s history was published as The History of Photographyfrom 1839 to the Present Day. For fuller accounts of photo-history’s own history, seeGasser; McCauley; Marien; Bertrand.

3 Foucault 62.

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4 Barthes ‘‘Rhetoric of the Image’’ 44.5 Barthes Camera Lucida 88.6 See, for example, Warner; Tucker; Brown; Pinney; Williams; Langford;

Johnston; Kelsey; Smith; Mavor; Mirzoeff; Edwards. See also Pinney; Peterson.7 Solomon-Godeau ‘‘Rubrics Cubed’’.8 Rogoff. See also Moxey.9 See, for example, Batchen Forget Me Not.

10 Barthes Camera Lucida; Agee and Evans; Solnit; Ennis.11 Foster ‘‘Archives without Museums’’ 104.12 Ibid. 105.13 Foster ‘‘The Artist as Ethnographer’’ 178, 180.14 Ibid. 196.15 Rampley.16 Edwards.17 Pinney.18 Batchen ‘‘Art since 1900: review’’.19 Foster ‘‘Archives without Museums’’103. It is on this basis, perhaps, that Foster is

able to offer a psychoanalytic reading of the response of seventeenth-century Dutchviewers to still life paintings. See Foster ‘‘The Art of Fetishism’’.

20 See Krauss and Foster.21 The paragraphs that follow are based on my catalogue essay, ‘‘From Infinity to

Zero’’, written for an exhibition curated by Marvin Heiferman, ‘‘Now Is Then:Snapshots from the Maresca Collection’’. Thanks are due to Mette Sandby for herhelpful comments on a draft of this essay.

22 The sudden burst of interest shown by art museums in snapshots is matched, and isperhaps even initiated by, a parallel interest on the part of contemporary artists.Artists as various as Tacita Dean, Joachim Schmid, and Akiko Ikeda have madework out of found snapshots, in each case presenting a different kind of creativearchaeology of the genre. See, for example, Tacita Dean’s Floh (2000) andGodfrey; MacDonald and Weber; Akiko Ikeda, Their Site/Your Sight (2000–8) –see her website: <http://www15.plala.or.jp/rouko73>. An earlier artisticinterest in the snapshot was confined to the borrowing of its aesthetic conventionsby such photographers as Emmet Gowin, Garry Winogrand, Nancy Rexroth, TodPapageorge, and Lee Friedlander. See Green.

23 Batchen ‘‘Post-photography’’ 111.24 See Stephen; West.25 Nickel; Walther. See also Smith.26 Walther ‘‘Acknowledgments’’ in Other Pictures.27 See her comments on the ‘‘identification of art history with art criticism’’ in

Golan. Golan refers in particular to Hal Foster’s ‘‘amazing knack, via a capaciousreservoir of highly hypostatized psychoanalytic terms, for packaging everythinginto splendid pairs’’. This is again demonstrated in Foster’s effort to present arthistory and visual culture as a binary opposition.

28 Frizot and de Veigy. A recent review of this book claims to notice a ‘‘more poeticand overtly personal attitude’’ to photography’s ‘‘elemental properties’’ than onefinds in American publications, in effect claiming that Frizot and de Viegy exhibit a‘‘French’’ sensibility in the selection of their snapshots. See Moore ‘‘Lost andFound’’ 94. Frizot himself has complained of the displacement of authorship from

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the snapshot photographer to the authority of the museum curator. Presumably hisrefusal to integrate his selection of snapshots into a coherent order is an effort tocounter this tendency. See Frizot.

29 Greenough and Waggoner.30 Waldie.31 Naef and Martineau.32 In this context, note the accidentally self-conscious pictorial qualities of the one

twentieth-century snapshot reproduced in Szarkowski 159. It is an example, inSzarkowski’s view, of the photographic medium speaking of and for itself. Forcritical comments on the historical approach taken by Szarkowski, see Solomon-Godeau, ‘‘Mandarin Modernism’’, 140–49, 183. It is also worth noting theacclaim given to the work of Jacques Henri Lartigue within art museums, allowingthem to single out a master artist among all other snapshot makers. See MooreJacques Henri Lartigue.

33 For more along these lines, see Batchen ‘‘Dreams of Ordinary Life’’ 63–74, 266–68.

34 See Whalen.35 Barthes ‘‘Rhetoric of the Image’’ 37–41.36 See Langford.37 Bourdieu et al. 30–31.38 Ibid. 31.39 Batchen ‘‘Camera Lucida’’; Benjamin.40 Barthes Camera Lucida 67.

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Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981.———. ‘‘Rhetoric of the Image.’’ Image–Music–Text. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977

[1964]. 32–51.Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘‘Art since 1900: review.’’ Art Bulletin 88.2 (2006): 376–77.———. ‘‘Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography.’’ The Meaning of

Photography. Ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson. Williamstown, MA: Clark ArtInstitute, 2008.

———. ‘‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination.’’Image and Imagination. Ed. Martha Langford. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s UniversityPress/Le Mois de la Photo, 2005.

———. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum/Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

———. ‘‘From Infinity to Zero.’’ Now Is Then: Snapshots from the Maresca Collection. Ed.Marvin Heiferman. Newark: Newark Museum, 2007. 120–130.

———. ‘‘Post-photography.’’ Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Benjamin, Walter. ‘‘A Small History of Photography.’’ Classic Essays on Photography. Ed.Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980 [1931].199–216.

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Bertrand, Allison. ‘‘Beaumont Newhall’s ‘Photography 1839–1937’: Making History.’’History of Photography 21.2 (1997): 137–46.

Bourdieu, Pierre, et al. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1990.

Brown, Elspeth H. The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of AmericanCommercial Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Edwards, Elizabeth. ‘‘Photographs and the Sound of History.’’ Visual Anthropology Review21.1–2 (2005): 27–46.

———. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001.Ennis, Helen. Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss and Photography. Canberra: National Gallery of

Australia, 2005.Foster, Hal. ‘‘Archives without Museums.’’ October Summer 1996.———. ‘‘The Artist as Ethnographer.’’ The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End

of the Century. MIT Press, 1996.———. ‘‘The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life.’ Fetishism as Cultural Discourse.

Ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press,1993. 251–65.

Foucault, Michel. ‘‘Politics and the Study of Discourse.’’ The Foucault Effect: Studies inGovernmentality. Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1991 [1968].

Frizot, Michel. ‘‘Amateurs et anonymes: de l’autorat et l’autorite en photographie.’’Perspective: La revue de l’INHA 3 (2006): 464–70.

——— , and Cedric de Veigy. Photo Trouvee. Paris: Phaidon, 2006.Gasser, Martin. ‘‘Histories of Photography, 1839–1939.’’ History of Photography 16.2

(1992): 50–60.Godfrey, Mark. ‘‘Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean’s Floh.’’ October Fall

2005: 90–119.Golan, Romy. ‘‘Art since 1900: Review.’’ Art Bulletin 88.2 (2006): 381–82.Green, Jonathan, ed. The Snapshot. New York: Aperture, 1974.Greenough, Sarah, Diane Waggoner, with Sarah Kennel and Matthew S. Witkovsky. The

Art of the American Snapshot 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson.Washington: National Gallery of Art/Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

Johnston, Patricia. Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1997.

Kelsey, Robin E. ‘‘Viewing the Archive: Timothy O’Sullivan’s Photographs for theWheeler Survey, 1871–74.’’ Art Bulletin 85.4 (2003): 702–23.

Kraussm Rosalind, and Hal Foster. ‘‘Introduction’’ and ‘‘Visual Culture Questionnare.’’October Summer 1996: 3–4.

Langford, Martha. ‘‘Introduction: Show and Tell.’’ Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife ofMemory in Photographic Albums. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2001. 3–21.

———. Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums. Montreal:McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2001.

MacDonald, Gordon and John S. Weber, eds. Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982–2007.Gottingen: Steidel, 2007.

Marien, Mary Warner. ‘‘What Shall We Tell the Children?: Photography and Its Text(Books).’’ Afterimage 13.9 (1986): 4–7.

Mavor, Carol. Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

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Mirzoeff, Nicholas. ‘‘The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index.’’Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. Ed. Coco Fusco and BrianWallis. New York: International Center of Photography/Harry N. Abrams, 2003.110–26.

Moore, Kevin. Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004.

———. ‘‘Lost and Found.’’ History of Photography 32.1 (2008).Moxey, Keith. ‘‘Nostalgia for the Real: The Troubled Relation of Art History to Visual

Studies’’ and ‘‘After the Death of the ‘Death of the Author’.’’ The Practice ofPersuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,2001. 103–42.

Naef, Weston, and Paul Martineau. Close to Home. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,2004.

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day. New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1949.

———. Photography: A Short Critical History. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938.Nickel, Douglas R. Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present. San

Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998.Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. London: Reaktion

Books, 1997.———. ‘‘Ethnographic Tales: Subjectivity5the New Objectivity.’’ Bidoun Spring/

Summer 2006: 151–53.———, and Nicolas Peterson, eds. Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2003.Rampley, Matthew. ‘‘Anthropology at the Origins of Art History.’’ Site-Specificity: The

Ethnographic Turn. Ed. Alex Coles. London: Black Dog, 2000. 138–63.Rogoff, Irit. ‘‘Studying Visual Culture.’’ The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff.

London/New York: Routledge, 1998. 14–26.Smith, Joel. ‘‘Roll Over: The Snapshot’s Museum Afterlife.’’ Afterimage September/

October 2001: 8–11.Smith, Shawn Michelle. American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New

York: Penguin, 2003.Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. ‘‘Mandarin Modernism: ‘Photography until Now’.’’ Art in

America December 1990.———. ‘‘Rubrics Cubed.’’ Bookforum Fall 1998: 33, 39–40.Stephen, Ann. ‘‘Mass Produced Photography in Australia during the Inter-war Years.’’ Art

Network Autumn 1983: 40–45.Szarkowski, John. Photography until Now. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989.Tucker, Jennifer. Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.Waldie, D. J. Close to Home: An American Album. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004.Walther, Thomas. Other Pictures. Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000.Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2006.

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West, Nancy Martha. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville/London: UniversityPress of Virginia, 2000.

Whalen, Catherine. ‘‘Finding ‘Me’.’’ Afterimage 29.6 (2002): 16–17.Williams, Carol J. Framing the West: Race, Gender, and the Photographic Frontier in the Pacific

Northwest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Geoffrey Batchen is a professor of art history at the Graduate Center of the City

University of New York, where he specializes in the history of photography. He is

currently working on an exhibition about the careers of Richard Beard and Antoine

Claudet, due to open at the Yale Center for British Art in October 2011. His books

include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997); Each Wild

Idea: Writing, Photography, History (MIT Press, 2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and

Remembrance (Van Gogh Museum/Princeton Architectural Press, 2004); and William

Henry Fox Talbot (Phaidon, 2008).

1 4 2 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

103.

18.7

2.59

] at

12:

38 0

3 M

ay 2

015