Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images by Catherine Zuromskis (review)

In her art-historical study of the neglected genre of snapshot photography, Catherine Zuromskis takes on the delicate task of expanding on canonical post-modernist and feminist critiques of the photographic medium. Noting that “private affect can be employed and regulated through public life,” Zuromskis adopts the customary argument that the family photograph is never free of the conventions of mass culture and the politics of representation. But she successfully refashions that argument, partly by drawing on the contemporary queer theory of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, among others. While Zuromskis acknowledges that the snapshot constructs the image of the American family, she attends to the instinct, desire, and affect that inspire us to shoot, share, collect, and prize pictures of loved ones. Through her case studies Zuromskis shows that the snapshot genre can be appropriated by communities that aspire to represent their alternative modes of social belonging. These photographs are not kept secret. Instead, they circulate through the community itself, creating what Warner calls a “counter-public” of emotionally and socially engaged viewers.

Zuromskis does not concentrate on private familial or individual uses of snapshots. Instead, she examines the multiple ways that vernacular photography is shaped and disseminated through an American culture that fetishizes the snapshot-perfect nuclear family. Drawing on Berlant’s work, Zuromskis argues that this idealized form of the family plays a key role in conservative rhetoric that links the insecure future of the nation to the vulnerability of children in particular. As we have seen, leveraging the mainstream concept of the heteronormative family has been a key strategy for political opposition to the movement to legalize gay marriage. Zuromskis discusses perceived threats to the family in her chapter on the film One Hour Photo and an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. In her analysis of the film, starring Robin Williams as a drugstore photo developer, Zuromskis details the threat posed to the picture-perfect—but dysfunctional—family by an isolated man who fantasizes that he has a close relationship with the family. His perversion of standards for reception of the snapshot escalates into criminal photographic stalking. While Williams’s character is definitively marginalized by the revelation that he was a victim of child pornography, the family emerges intact. In her discussion of Law and Order, Zuromskis goes on to examine the perversion of the family photograph in child pornography. Here the author links the pedophilic exploitation of children to their role in the American family as bearers of the promise of “futurity,” which is lost to individuals and nation alike if the child is not protected. Zuromskis observes that when the television program evokes in its viewers feelings of horror and disgust at the photographic exploitation of children, it reinforces the normative use of the snapshot as a love- and hope-inspiring vehicle for the perpetuation of the mythic family.

Zuromskis’s chapter on the much-discussed Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 touring exhibition “The Family Of Man” moves beyond the standard critique of the show’s “rosy sentimental humanism.” She observes that curator Edward Steichen did not hold with the museum’s tendency to aestheticize everything and thus should not be faulted for lacking a socio-political vision. Steichen designed instead a spectacular exhibition so that viewing the show felt like consuming photographs in magazines and family albums. This evoked in the viewers visceral affective responses rather than simple sentimentality, and thereby encouraged viewers to feel connected to the international array of people pictured in their daily lives.

Zuromskis turns her attention to the photograph in later twentieth-century art in chapters on Andy Warhol’s workaday photo-mania and Nan Goldin’s snapshot-inspired art photography. Warhol is usually described as someone who used technology to distance himself from people. Zuromskis counters this image of the Pop artist by assessing his habit of photographing the diverse outsiders who gathered at the Factory in the 1960s. For Warhol photography was a vehicle for intimate...