Travel – Snapshots

Carnac, France, Aug 85, 850825-6-2Carnack, France, August 1985

The job of scanning negatives from early trips continues – I’ve recently done from 1985 to 2001. Doing so set me thinking about the nature of the trips that I’m trying to bring together in a photo book. Just over 70 trips to 24 countries across 57 years means a lot of material to work through. Seventy-one per cent of trips were taken in spring or summer; and 88% were with family or friends (including some group tours), with only 10% professional or solo trips where there was more time to think about photography. The last three figures led me to question again whether I’m dealing with an extended collection of snapshots or something more considered (see posts 6th and 18th October 2014).

I was tempted to say ‘merely snapshots’, thinking of the term in a rather pejorative way. However, although it may be used to condemn, it may also be used to praise, indeed it is ambiguous and might even be so vague as to have little currency. Gary Winogrand took the view that all photographs are snapshots and it is not the description of a separate photographic aesthetic. He claimed: “There is only still photography with its own unique aesthetic. Still photography is the distinctive term.” While photography does have its unique underlying qualities, it seems a little perverse to deny that it embraces definable genres.

John A. Kouwenhoven defined snapshots in a way that combined both process and product:
…predominantly photographs taken quickly with a minimum of deliberate posing on the part of the people represented and with a minimum of deliberate selectivity on the part of the photographer so far as vantage point and the framing or cropping of the image are concerned.

Lisette Model saw the snapshot as focused on everyday experiences and embodying convention, it is part of having a family, going on holiday and so on. It is “…something which is done directly, without any intention of being good or bad, done only because one want to do it.” Jonathan Green has used the words “unpretentious”, “evanescent”, “vitality”, “ambiguity” and “naïve” in discussing snapshots.

What should I conclude from this? While the context in which most on the photographs I’m looking at was one that might dictate taking snapshots, in practice a great majority were more considered and taken using subjective decisions about what was and was not significant at the time. Whether they are good photographs and whether spontaneity had been sacrificed for (pretentious) consideration are other questions.

Near Saranda, Albania, 010709-6-2Photo: Near Saranda, Albania, July 1981

In July 2001 I climbed out of a coach near Saranda, Albania, walked to the edge of the road and pointed my camera across a rocky field and over the Adriatic towards distant Corfu. Snapshot or not?

(Quotes taken from Aperture, vol. 19, no. 1, 1974)

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