Snapshots, or: Visual Culture's Clichés

Abstract

Visual culture scholars and historians of photography are looking for new ways to interpret and historicize vernacular snapshot photography, seeking to explain one of snapshot photography's defining characteristics: repetitiveness in form and content. This paper proposes to account for repetition by linking the snapshot to a seemingly unrelated vernacular phenomenon: the cliché. The two phenomena — one visual, the other linguistic — have more in common than at first appears. The genealogies of the cliché — an “expression or idea that has lost its originality or force through overuse” — and the snapshot photograph — “predictable, conservative, and repetitive in both form and content”, go back to the same point of origin: the printing workshops of nineteenth century France, while at the same time presenting a continuation of a pre-modern, oral tradition in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation through repetition.

Notes

1 In this essay, I refer to snapshots as the kind of photographs that Richard Chalfen has defined as “photographic pictorial forms, generally made by nonprofessional photographers, that visually represent personally important subject matter, for use and interpretation in private contexts of interpersonal communicative relationships”, and that Geoffrey Batchen has more economically called “art history's worst nightmare: boring pictures” (Chalfen, “Redundant Imagery” 106; Batchen, “Snapshots”, 121).

2 Schmid and Kessels are but the most recent (and of the most recent, the most renowned) of a whole spade of artists who collect and display vernacular photographs in this way; earlier examples can be traced back to Gerhard Richter's Atlas, begun in the 1960s and continuing through today.

3 “Visual culture” can be used to describe both an object of study and a field of research. Originally used as a term to “designate the distinctive visual skills and modes of attention exercised by painters in a historical phase of a national culture; as an emergent object of study it can be seen as an historical event itself, accompanying the nineteenth-century mechanical production and reproduction of images” (“Editorial”). The field that takes on visual culture as its object is an interdisciplinary one, borrowing techniques from art history, anthropology, communications, history, and film studies, to name but a few. For an overview of the “visual turn” in anthropology for example, see Mahon. For a critique of the “visual turn”, see Foster.

4 According to Sabin, clicher is an onomatopoetic verb, derived from the clattering sound of the printing press.

5 “A process for copying, called in France clichée” in Babbage. Incidentally, British astronomer and inventor Charles Babbage (he invented the computer, among other things) was close friends with John Herschel, who produced the first glass negatives for photography, allowing for multiple reproductions of the same image; Herschel is also credited with first coining the term “snapshot” in relation to photography (Kouwenhoven).

6 Although the first photographic image was produced by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in the early 1820s, the invention of photography is usually taken to coincide with the invention of the daguerreotype, by Louis Daguerre, in 1839. The first glass negatives were produced by John Herschel (see above).

7 The author is aware that citing Benjamin's essay in a paper about photography is a somewhat hackneyed move.

8 The Oxford English Dictionary lists mentionings of “cliché” in the technological sense from 1832 to 1868, and the quotations from New York Times, Christian Advocate and Outing indicate that the word was still being used as such in the 1890s. However, the phrase “negative clichés” is already a pleonasm, and later on it seems that “negative” on its own wins out. This might be because of later technological developments in photography, which took place mostly in the United States rather than in France, as Reese Jenkins has described. In French it is still common to say “prendre un cliché” for taking a photograph, and “clichés” for prints, although “photos” is more commonly used.

9 See, for example, Lionel Trilling: “That the word [authenticity] has become part of the moral slang of our day points to the peculiar nature of our fallen condition, our anxiety over the credibility of existence and of individual existences. An eighteenth-century aesthetician states our concern succinctly: ‘Born Originals,’ Edward Young said, ‘how comes it to pass that we die copies?’” (Trilling, p. 93).

10 Of course, citing this slogan in a photography paper is by now a cliché in and of itself.

11 Nancy Martha West offers a thorough analysis of the company's marketing campaigns in those early years, arguing that “Kodak has done more than any other single enterprise or individual to determine the uses and expectations for snapshot photography.” (p. xii) For further analysis of Kodak marketing campaigns, see also Kotchemidova; Olivier.

12 Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy writes: “In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence” (34).

13 I have discussed this revival previously, in “The Authentic Amateur”.

14 And clichés, too, have a chilling effect on the passing of time: “in clichés time has been frozen. Human expressions in language and behaviour tend to be in a state of flux, changing their content and form with the development of socio-cultural life. But when these expressions turn into clichés, time freezes” (Zijderveld 16). The relation between memory and photography is by no means uncontested, however: “As long as photography has existed, claims for its usefulness as a repository of memory has been countered by arguments that echo the ancient distrust of writing, the fear that reliance on any system of recording ultimately leads to mental degeneration, to a condition of mnemonic atrophy” (Langford, 4). Nevertheless, sociological and ethnographic research time and again shows that people, when interviewed about their reasons for taking photographs, offer memory and remembrance as a reason (see, for example, Batchen, “Ere the Substance Fade”; Boerdam; Chalfen, Snapshot; David; Okabe and Ito; Oksman).

15 This practice was copied in later years by Gelett Burgess in Are You a Bromide? (1906), Logan Parsall Smith in Words and Idioms (1925) and Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Clichés (1940), among others. Actually, the tradition of “commonplace books” goes back much further, as they were used as a device for the study of Rhetoric right from the Ancients up until the Renaissance: “commonplaces … are excerpts culled from one's own compositions or from other authors in one or another standard subject and saved up in one's head (or later in writing) for subsequent use” (Ong, Rhetoric, Romance 261). However, Flaubert's project was different in that is collecting the commonplace expressions not to use them but, on the contrary, to discourage others from employing them at all. This subversive way of collecting clichés is intrinsically modern. Indeed, like the cliché, the desire to collect and order information in dictionaries is a modern phenomenon; it did not get into full swing until the 18th century, aided, of course, by the printing press — see, for example, Headrick's When Information Came of Age or Ong's Rhetoric, Romance and Technology. In a way, the fact that clichés should be collected refers to the way in which “cliché” is bound up with modernity and commodity culture: “we exchange clichés like the many coins of our inflated system. They are easily coined and easily spent, and they are available in great quantities”, Anton Zijderveld has observed (6). The same has been said about snapshots: “commodity culture in the mid-to late nineteenth century [was] a culture Kodak helped shape with its transformation of memory and experience into an infinite supply of objects that could be bought and sold (West 4). As it happens, snapshots, too, have traditionally been collected in books: “the word snapshot is tied in meaning to the family album, a book which brought to photography a new vernacular form” (Aperture 24). And, per West, “collection implies an attempt at completion, a desire for narrative wholeness. This observation applies most poignantly to the collection of photographs” (West 3).

16 Noting a similar phenomenon in linguistic terms, Anton Zijderveld has written that “by means of sheer repetition clichés mold people's minds and souls in a specific direction”.

17 “The look of a snapshot is so similar around the world that it amounts to a universal style,” Lisette Model wrote in 1974. Today, the universality of snapshot conventions is rendered visible in particular by artists/collectors like the abovementioned Joachim Schmidt and Erik Kessels.

18 Sometimes to detrimental effect: “Our English is corrupted, of course, not only by the indolent use of stale phrases, but by the almost ferocious effort to avoid them, by saying everything as no mortal would naturally say it”, Andrew Lang wrote in the New York Tribune in 1902, concluding that “this laborious exercise, if perseveringly practiced, constitutes what is now called style. We have many authors with a great deal of ‘style,’ and all of it bad”.

19 “He never edits; he never editorializes; he just snaps away”, wrote Ken Graves and Mitchell Payne of the snapshot photographer in 1977 (6). This thoughtlessness need not always be a bad thing: in 1944, MoMA worked together with Eastman Kodak to organize an exhibition called The American Snapshot. W.D. Morgan of the Museum's Department of Photography wrote approvingly that “the folk art of the camera is unself-conscious” (p. 1). Likewise, Lisette Model extolled that the snapshot's unselfconsciousness was “exactly their appeal and their style. The picture isn't straight. It isn't done well. It isn't thought out. And out of this imbalance, and out of this not knowing, and out of this real innocence toward the medium comes and enormous vitality and expression of life” (6).