Snapshot Versions of Life

4. Snapshot Communication: Exploring the Decisive Half Minute

Chapter Four Snapshot Communication: Exploring The Decisive Half Minute When studying snapshots and snapshot communication in the same way as home movies, two facts become evident. First, a great deal of similarity between home movies and snapshots appears in the patterned choice of participants, settings, topics, and certain aspects of code structure, in spite of differences between motion and still photography. The structure and sequence of communication events-planning, editing, etc.- is also the same. In general, behavioral components appear to coincide; the friendly commands "smile" or "say cheese" replace requests to "move" or "do something." Secondly, photography guides and manuals offer the same kinds of advice and admonishments. Prescriptions for image content are generally the same. As expected, movement and action are emphasized primarily in the movie guides. However, story-telling and the production of sequenced images are emphasized in guides for both mediums. Advertisements for Kodak, as "America's Storyteller" come to mind. l Snapshot collections, like home movies, reveal most photographer's reluctance to create visual stories or visual narratives. The narrative remains in the heads of the picturemakers and on-camera participants for verbal telling and re-telling during exhibition events. Significant details remain as part of the context; the story does not appear in the album or on the screen; it is not "told" by the images. In this sense, a picture may be "worth a 1000 words," ... words that are stimulated by and accompany the showing of a snapshot. Home mode imagery provides an example of how pictures don't literally "say" anythingpeople do the talking. To help reduce the apparent sense of visual redundancy which underlies all home mode pictorial communication, another strategy of presentation will be used in this chapter. Kodak's slogan "America's Storyteller" provided an interesting stimulus to reformulate the notion of "story" into the context of an individual lifetime. Snapshot photographs document key moments in an individual's life, a life story. Readers are asked to consider the following question: When in the course of a lifetime is a white middle class member otAmerican society asked 70 Snapshot Communication 71 to appear as an on-camera participant in snapshot communication? Our strategy will be to outline the settings, topics, events, and activities from birth to death that prompt snapshot recording for future home mode exhibition.2 Approaches To The Snapshot Nearly every member of American society makes, appears in, or uses snapshots on some way. Alan Coleman, in discussing the immense popularity of the snapshot, wrote: Today there are billions of photographs commercially processed each year in the United States alone. Most of these are snapshots destined for scrapbooks and shoe boxes.... They are made, treasured, scrutinized, lived with, and passed on. As a demotic artifact, the photo album is so ubiquitous and so much taken for granted as part of life of our society that it seems somewhat shocking and revealing to encounter one of those rare families-the Nixons, for example-which has kept no family album. And it is a rare person indeed who has not appeared in dozens, even hundreds of photographs.3 The snapshot has been defined and described in different ways and has been valued for a variety of reasons. A paucity of literature exists on home movies, but the same can not be said for snapshots. The problem which remains is one of sorting out the public and private contexts, in which the snapshot image and its variations appear (see Chapter Eight). Some types of discussion are more useful than others when interpreting snapshots as they relate to our notion of Kodak culture. Two alternative approaches are very useful; the technical approach, and the folk art approach. Chemical-Technical Concerns According to many historical accounts, the photographic form "snapshot" did not emerge until the appropriate technologies had been developed. For instance, Halpern notes that as late as 1850, "casual family life was not yet recognized as legitimate subject matter, nor was there a willingness to let the first cumbersome cameras [meaning "photographs," of course-ed.] diverge from accepted pictorial standards. It was not until thirty years later that technical innovations in photography and the idealization of the nuclear family allowed the snapshot to begin its rise to dominance."4 Photographs however have been used as snapshots, that is, for purposes of private visual communication-since the invention of the photographic process around 1839. 72 Snapshot Versions of Life Camera...