The popularity of Kodak cameras such as the Brownie produced many reactions from professional photographers. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, several comments on amateur photographers had been publicized. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz, for instance, warned the amateurs that they still had a lot to learn: “Don't believe you became an artist the instant you received a gift Kodak on Xmas morning.”122 Though the Kodak Company emphasized in their advertisement that customers only had “to Press the Button,”
instruction manuals printed in books such as Charles Maus Taylor’s 1902 Why My
Photographs are Bad
123 show that the photographic process of taking picture was not that easy.Though taking photographs became much easier, it did not guarantee the quality of the pictures. As Taylor mentions in his book, he personally had to face bad results after several trials until he eventually learned tips from a professional photographer.124 Taylor’s book, which references the most common mistakes made by amateurs with the help of illustrations, is an important source that can help us to define some of the specificities of amateur photography. We can compare the faults it tries to correct according to Taylor’s professional standards and the way these same faults were later deliberately “staged” by professional photographers.
But we must note that the feature of amateur photography should not be only restricted to the form and so-called mistakes. The core concept of amateur snapshot is actually related to a group of users who take photographs to record their lives,
122 Alfred Stieglitz, “Twelve Random Don’ts,” in: Photographic Topics, 1909, p. 1.
123 Charles Maus Taylor, Why My Photographs are Bad, Philadelphia: G.W. Jacobs & co., 1902. The book was just published after the releasing of the Brownie cameras. It is clear that the popularity of amateurs’ photographs caused some counterpart reaction.
124 Charles Maus Taylor, Why My Photographs are Bad, pp .9-10.
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especially some happy or important moments. Capturing time is also important for amateur photographers who are willing to keep the memory of an event in a still image; but the main purpose is not to freeze a shocking moment or a movement to convey the idea of time. Instead, we often see that the amateur photographs are posed, because the ambition is essentially to keep the emotion of the fleeting time. Amateur photography is in this respect closely related to the shooter’s family circle and conveys a specific emotional atmosphere, no matter how banal the context is.
When professional photographers borrow traits from amateur photography, they generally do not only refer to its formal aspects but try to imitate the subjects or the attitudes that are commonly recorded by amateurs. Representing daily life and the intimacy of banal activities became a source for artistic creativity during the 1960s and 1970s. Some photographers like Dan Graham (1942- ), for example, took photographs of banal American suburban houses.125 Vito Acconci (1940- ), in his work Arm Bending Pieces, decided to continuously press the button of his Kodak camera when his arm was moving back and forth, showing the dull cityscape without any emotion (Fig. 30).126 However, unlike the amateur photographs we have seen in Chapter One, Dan Graham’s and Vito Acconci’s experimental works do not convey any emotion. If they focus on banal subjects, they try to avoid representing any affects.
Their purpose is not to record the emotions, as it is in the case of Marjorie Parker’s photograph (Fig. 11).
Familial and intimate life attracted several art photographers such as Emmet Gowin (1941-), who photographed his wife and her extended family in their
125 He made his series of magazine style photographs “Home for America” showing banal houses and shopping malls with texts. The layout of discrete rectangular images and texts is akin to the minimalist art of his time. In: Mattew S. Witkovsky, “When the Earth was Square”, in: The Art of American Snapshot: 1888- 1978, p. 242.
126 He also did similar photographic works called Toe-Touch, Spin, Blinks, Jumps, and Pick-Up. The titles entail the exercises he was doing during the time he took photographs. Ibid., p. 244.
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hometown (Fig.31). Lee Friedlander (1934- ) also recorded the most ordinary moments of life (Fig. 32), and Nicholas Nixon (1947- ) made a photographic chronicle of his wife and her three sisters (Fig. 33). Their works show the appreciation of family life, but they do not contain accidents or mistakes, as is often the case for amateur snapshots.
Among the numbers of professional photographers who paid attention to the banalities of familial and intimate life, Nan Goldin and Larry Sultan are particularly interesting, since they adopted in the 1980s not only the formal aspects of amateur photography but also its common topics. We will see that their interest in amateur photography is a rehabilitation of authenticity in the moment photography was accepted as an art form. Also worth mention is that both photographers were later involved in fashion photography and convey the feature of their work into fashion photography, which also adopts the aesthetic of amateur snapshot as a selling strategy.
3-1 Snapshot: Forms of Bad Photographs
In 1902, Charles Maus Taylor published a book entitled Why My Photographs are
Bad, drawing on his own experience in order to teach amateurs how to avoid the
mistakes he personally made when he began photography. Since he did not know how to improve his photographic practice, he finally requested the help of a professional who taught him how to properly handle his camera. Published at the time when the Kodak Brownie was common on the market and was supposed to be so easy to use that even a schoolboy or schoolgirl could use it, Taylor’s book demonstrates that the simplicity of the camera did not necessarily guarantee good results.127
127 For example, he recommends the amateur to use the Kodak roll film and roll film camera. In:
Charles Maus Taylor, Why My Photographs are Bad, p. 28. He also suggested using no. 1 Folding Pocket Kodak for a trip because of the universal focusing. Here we can see the book is practical and material oriented. Ibid., p. 28.
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His book enlists sixteen bad examples with illustrations caused by the misuse of the lens, the wrong measuring of the focus, or other bad habits. To avoid bad results, the camera shooter should know the reason why mistakes happened and learn the tips to prevent them. Of course, the book could not list all kinds of formal mistakes. For example, because the book was published in 1902, there was no discussion on the use of the flashlight.128 We can see in this book some examples,129 for example double exposure, which was common at the time because it was still necessary to roll the film each time after taking a photograph.130 If we ignore the technical aspects that were improved later, the book synthesizes the most common errors made by the average users. As the author says, “I do not wish to convey to the reader the impression that this limited work covers all the errors of the beginners— far from it.”131 The feature of amateur photography can be defined by common mistakes that depend on the education of the amateurs and technical difficulties they encountered. These difficulties had an impact on the formal aspect of photography.132
The first obvious problem mentioned in this book is related to bad framing. As Taylor says, “It is the grotesque appearance: the head or a portion of the body of the sitter being cut off.”133 The book shows the portrait of one woman whose upper part of the face has been truncated by the frame (Fig. 34). According to the author, this
128 The flashlight was commonly used from the 1950s-60s onwards.
129 In that time, there were also The Amateur Photographers’ Hand Book published in 1891 and
Amateur Photography: A Practical Guide for the Beginner in 1893. They are mostly technical in nature.
In: The Art of American Snapshot: 1888-1978, p.27.
130 Taylor also mentions that the double exposure can be easily prevented. As long as the shooter “Do not fail to turn the spool immediately after taking a picture (…).” This is not the case now because we have automatic spools or even digital CCD. In: Taylor Charles Maus, Why My Photographs are Bad, pp. 92-93.
131 Ibid., p. 13
132 I do not want to detail all the examples in the book. Some mistakes, such as “too much foreground,”
and “too much sky”, can be considered similar to the assortment of “placing the picture”. Some suggestions are too out of date, such as “the Use of a Head Rest”. The purpose of a head rest was to keep the protagonist’s head still for pervading a blurred image because of the long exposure. The head rest disappeared with the great improvement of the sensitivity of the films.
133 Taylor Charles Maus, Why My Photographs are Bad, p. 33.
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happened frequently to the beginners because the camera was too close to the figure.
However, the mistake is tolerable when the truncated figure is not the main protagonist of the picture, such as in Marjorie Parker’s We had Such a Good Time (Fig.11). The bizarre composition showing around the main figure was not considered too bad, since the photographer still kept the main figure in the middle.
This reminds me a photograph of mine, showing my grandfather in front of a touristic spot during a journey. We see him leaning on a handrail (Fig. 35). The photograph seems at first sight well balanced, except the incongruous presence of a hand on the left side of the image. Why the hand is over there? Apparently the photographer did not notice the presence of this person in the viewfinder or tried to avoid this without noting the detail of the remaining hand. The photographer wanted to focus on my grandfather, and had him as the main subject of the picture. It was enough to keep the photograph.
Taylor also mentions the issue of portraiture, may it be a single person or a group.
In the chapter “Posing Single Figures and Groups,” where photographers are recommended to “avoid stiffness and straight lines in posing [their] subjects,”134 we can see from the photographic illustration that the woman is standing too straight in an interior space, which looks like a photographic studio (Fig. 36). Her hands are perpendicular on the either side of her body, her dark skirt emphasizing the heaviness of the vertical lines of the composition with a table on her left side emphasizing the parallel lines to her. On the contrary, the carpet becomes a vertical contrast of the figure. This studio photograph might exaggerate the stiffness of the composition. But it reminds the common experience when we are posing for a photograph. One
134 Ibid., p.47.
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difficulty is how to behave naturally in front of the camera.135 Except for some photogenic people with experience, many people are embarrassed to be photographed.136 The photograph L Will Take Care of Sister (Fig. 37) explains the tense moment of the photographic pose. We can see from the picture that two children are standing in front of a portal. The right one must be L, and the girl with curly hair must be the sister. The photographer tried to compose the image carefully. There is no random truncation, and the door behind the two children becomes a stable frame.
However, the photographer was so careful that the children have lost any spontaneity and look like statues. This kind of composition is actually common especially when the image concerns a group of portrait. In order to reduce the strictness, some tricks are used in order to make the composition more lively and casual.
Portraiture is certainly the example where the issue of spontaneity is the trickiest, as seen in the case of a photograph I took during a study trip in 2010 (Fig. 38) on the way from Germany to Italy, where the bus driver had to make a break at a gas station.
When we saw the scenic view of the mountains, it became necessary to take a photograph. When I was asked to take the picture,137 the group members immediately arranged themselves automatically into a line to make sure that everyone could be seen. As we can see, everybody is looking and smiling at the camera without complaining that the sun is disagreeably dazzling. Some people in the photograph show their own will to make the photograph more animated, as for example the girl on the right hand side who is bending her body and make some movement to lighten
135 This aspect of posing and behaving in front of a camera inspired the photographer Rineke Dijkstra (1959- ) who invited people to pose for her photographs, such as the series of Beaches (1992-1996). In the series, the protagonists look at the photographer directly, but also reveal the insecurity and tension in their gestures, the way they keep their hands, as even on their skin.
136 Lori Pauli, “Setting the Scene”, in: Acting the part: Photography as Theatre, London: Merrell, 2006, p. 15.
137 The main purpose of the trip was to experience the route Albrecht Dürer took to cross the Alps.
This photograph proves that we made the trip. It becomes the evidence that we were there.
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the atmosphere. But most of the protagonists put themselves in a straight line, a mistake that Taylor already noticed and wanted to prevent one hundred years ago.
Nevertheless, the result of this photograph is still just like thousands of banal other pictures of the same kind offering the same kind of stereotype.
Other faults such as the presence of foreshortening, the shadow of the operator, double exposure, and bad focus can be often seen in amateurs’ photographs. Taylor, for example, shows the presence of the operator signalled by his shadows cast on the portrait of a man (Fig. 39) holding two dead birds on his right hand, while carrying in his left hand a beam from which other dead birds are hanging. Similar photographs where we can see the presence of the photographer can be found in several catalogues dealing with snapshot photography. In the 2008 exhibition catalogue of The Art of
American Snapshot, 1888 to 1979: from the Collection of Robert E. Jackson, we can
see another example of a woman in a black dress carrying a baby wrapped in white drapery in an empty street (Fig. 40). The shadow of the photographer appears in the foreground and is even cast on the woman’s body. The contrast of black and white and the ominous shadow made by inexperience create uneasy effects.To illustrate foreshortening, Taylor shows a woman reading and leaning on the edge of a table. Her left hand holds the edge of the table and is almost twice as large as her right hand because it is too close to the camera (Fig. 41). In the part of the book devoted to the misuse of the lens, Taylor shows the example of a woman sitting on a chair, with her hands well arranged on her lap and her eyes staring at the camera (Fig.
42). Though the figure is well constructed, the image is unfortunately out of focus.
These mistakes are not isolated, since we can easily find many similar examples throughout the history of amateur photography. For example, this is the case in the same exhibition catalogue on the American snapshot. One photograph shows a group
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of people queuing before a building (Fig. 43). Some of them are conscious of the camera, but the people on the left side of the procession are looking at the left side.
We do not know what they are waiting for. But one woman emerging from the right side of the frame is so close to the lens that her image is out of focus. Her body, which occupies one third of the photograph, is also cut by the frame. She is much bigger than the people in the background because of the foreshortening. Though the image is obscure, her eyes staring at the camera make her extremely vivid in comparison to the passive passengers behind her.
In place of being destroyed or disregarded, the accidental mistakes condemned by Taylor in his 1902 book were finally cherished and collected. The 2000 catalogue
Other Pictures shows the taste of a collector who assembled pictures that present
random mistakes instead of presenting formalized and banal ritualized photographs.We have, for example, a man with a truncated head raised by a bull (Fig. 44), or the blurred image of a woman on a train (Fig. 45). Unlike Taylor, museums and collectors consider accidental mistakes to be masterpieces, and bad characteristics of a picture could become “successful failure,” as the author claims in Other Pictures.138
But the phenomenon and legitimization of “bad photographs” is not recent.
Actually, when the book Why My Photographs are Bad was published, the appreciation of the mistakes criticized by Taylor had already been valued by another group of professional photographers as early as 1896. Some bad photographs were seen as a “novel effect,” such as in the first edition of the book Photographic
Amusement: a Description of a Number of Novel Effects Obtainable with the Camera,
139 written by Walter E. Woodbury and Frank R. Fraprie. As the authors138 Mia Fineman, Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publisher, 2000, appendix essay.
139 Walter E. Woodbury, and Frank R. Fraprie, Photographic Amusements: including a Description of a
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assert, the book did not address naïve amateurs but experienced people: “It is assumed that the reader has already mastered the technical difficulties of photographic practice and is able to make a good negative or print.”140 It gives some instructions how to use the camera and achieve some instructive and interesting photographic experiments.
Some bad characteristics mentioned later by Taylor in Why My Photographs are
Bad, such as foreshortening, can be found in Photographic Amusements. The
photograph that serves as a model shows a man whose shoes occupy the foreground, whereas his face, which is very small, appears between his shoes (Fig. 46). This photograph was taken from a low angle and close to the soles of the model in order to emphasize the contrast made by the foreshortening.Both examples in Why My Photographs are Bad and Photographic Amusements are actually deliberately made for different purposes. The former book shows the unpleasant exaggeration of proportion, and the latter demonstrates the innovative potential of photography. If we compare these examples with another one presented in the catalogue exhibition The Art of American Snapshot, 1888 to 1979, (Fig. 43) we can understand that the sudden appearance of the woman’s face in the right side of the frame was not intentional.
The difference between them can be even clearer when analysing the issue of double exposure. In Photographic Amusements, this issue occupies almost three chapters. The one entitled, Freak Pictures by Successive Exposures instructs readers how to cover the sensitive plate “for allowing all parts of it to be successively
Number of Novel Effects Obtainable with the Camera, Ninth edition, Boston: American Photographic Publishing Co., 1922, p. 83.
140 Ibid., p. 5.
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exposed”141 Another one entitled Doubles shows how to make a photograph of the same man playing cards with himself. Finally, The Two Head Man (Fig.47) demonstrates how to combine two poses of the same person on a single image. In this picture, the man is composed of two doubles of himself and looks like conjoined twins; the one on the left is writing while the other one on the right is raising his head.
In order to connect the two parts perfectly, it was necessary to master the technique.
In order to connect the two parts perfectly, it was necessary to master the technique.