the trouble with snapshots

(bit lifted from PDN interview with London College of Fashion professor Ken Miller, about his new book of snapshot photographs)

PDN: In your essay for the book, you talk about photographers choosing to keep photographs that most people would discard, and how that makes the photographer the subject as much as what’s in the photograph. Do you think that there’s a danger of snapshot work becoming overly self-conscious to the point that it’s more about photographers challenging viewers to figure out the value in increasingly mundane images?

KM: Yes, there’s definitely a risk of that. If anything, I think that very well could be the logical conclusion of this. I’m not going to name names, but I think there are certain photographers who are already going there.

PDN: In other words, the composition of an image is becoming secondary to the photographer’s insistence that the image has value?

KM: We are already seeing that. It’s funny: you could almost say that snapshot photography is starting to reach its decadent phase. To go from saying, “Ok, there’s this image that other people don’t find attractive, but I sincerely do find it attractive, and I’m going to present it so that they develop an appreciation for it,” to saying “I’m just going to throw whatever out there because I think that every image is valuable,” I think there’s validity to that, [but] it starts to get a little bit flat and it also starts to get a bit risky when it becomes so self-reflexive on the photographer. Again, I’m not going to name names, but there are definitely people who are doing that.

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