Outside Art: Exhibiting Snapshot Photography

"The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson." Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, October 7–December 31, 2007. Exhibition curated by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner.

"Accidental Mysteries: Extraordinary Vernacular Photographs from the Collection of John and Teenuh Foster." Organized by the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, September 24, 2005–January 7, 2006. Exhibition curated by Olivia Lahs-Gonzalez with John Foster.

In October of 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a group of volunteers from Erie, Pennsylvania, traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi, to collect family snapshots that had been separated from their owners by wind and flood. The volunteers installed boxes at local Wal-Mart stores where people could drop off any anonymous photos they had come across. The photographs left in the drop boxes were then scanned and posted to a Web site so that hurricane survivors could pore over the images and, potentially, find and reclaim precious records of their family histories. The Picture Project, as the organization is called, takes to heart the oft-repeated assertion that the first things one saves from one's house in the event of a disaster, and conversely the most tragic things to be lost, are the family snapshots. While any number of domestic objects may hold significant financial or sentimental value—grandmother's pearls, the family bible, title deeds, diplomas, or other personal documents—nothing seems to rival the album or shoebox full of family photographs as a souvenir of the past, a record of family history, and an existential and indexical trace of the self. Though the Picture Project Web site acknowledges that many Katrina survivors likely had more pressing concerns than recovering old photos, the organizers also assert that "once a moment in time has passed, unless it has been captured in a photo and that photo saved, the physical memory is gone . . . Without this project, some families will lose their entire history in photos."¹ Snapshot photographs, they suggest, embody, and at times even replace remembered familial histories. By the same turn, and shifting focus from the family to the visual object itself, we might also say that a family's history and identity constitute a significant part of the snapshot photograph's meaning and reason for being. Once a personal photograph is separated from the individuals who inscribe it through oral narrative, preservation, and interpersonal exchange, the photograph's history is lost as well. Divested of the kinds of personal associations and subjective meanings that are so rarely evident in the photograph itself, the lost or abandoned snapshot is rendered mute and meaningless, an arcane document of an unknown life. Thus, by putting found snapshots on the public stage of the Internet, the Picture Project seeks not only to restore family histories, but also to rehabilitate images by returning them to their particular social contexts.

For every snapshot that is found and archived by the Picture Project, however, there are potentially hundreds more that are simply lost or abandoned. Given the interdependence between snapshot photographs and the individual and familial networks in which and for which they are created, it is puzzling that these anonymous snapshots have become something of an art-world superstar of late. Once the bailiwick of oddball, flea-market and junk-shop denizens, vintage snapshots have of late caught the eye of more high-profile collectors such as Thomas Walther and Robert Flynn Johnson. The past decade has also seen the emergence of a number of vernacular also seen the emergence of a number of vernacular photography galleries, both online and brick-and-mortar establishments. Perhaps the most prominent aspect of this cultural trend, however, is the proliferation of museum exhibitions devoted to the vintage snapshot. Within the past decade alone, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the International Center for Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Contemporary Museum, the Aldrich Contemporary Arts Museum, and the Newark Museum have all mounted exhibitions of found snapshots or personal vernacular photographic objects.²

In dramatic contrast to the public archives of the Picture Project...