Taken in a Flash, but Taken In More Slowly
In 'The Art of the American Snapshot,' What You See Isn't All You Get

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 7, 2007; Page M08

"The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978" at the National Gallery of Art begins with the first Kodak (which took pictures that were circular, didn't have a viewfinder and weighed more than a pound) and closes with the Polaroid. Vacation snaps and pet snaps, shots of birthday cakes and proms, bedrooms and front yards. You'll recognize their spirit, which is intimate and amateur. The snapshots on the wall are cousins of your own.

Still, this show feels different. Its 234 pictures, which hang in the West Building, aren't like the others there.

It's not just that they are smaller (most could slip into your wallet). And it's not just that they are cheaper (the current market value of the snapshots in a shoebox is pretty close to nil). It's something else as well. Hovering among these culled and curious photos is an eerie indistinctness. A distinctive human spirit, playful and American, shimmers in these pictures, but you can't tell whose it is.

Art implies an artist. Great art implies a great one. Many gallery exhibits come with palpable personae. You can't walk among the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner without sensing the presence of England's grandest painter, rough-hewn and romantic, striding at your side. Edward Hopper's exhibition feels similarly inhabited. That lurker in the shadows, that peerer into bedrooms, left his wistful personality in everything he did. In the snapshot exhibition, you're never sure who's there.

For instance: Who deserves the credit for "Mary Girow's Cadillac," a red-and-brownish color snap from 1956? Is it only the photographer, who didn't know enough to take a half-step backward so that the whole car would fit into the frame? Were all the things that make the picture work -- the darkness of the background, the streaking of the highlights that set the car in motion, the sharpness of that burnt triangle of lawn, and especially the cup, the crucially red cup on which the whole thing pivots -- entirely intentional? Or was it just dumb luck?

Did accidental forces give the piece its power? Is the snapshot of the Caddy more like a length of driftwood rescued from a beach than a piece of art?

If so, who gets the credit for noticing its worth? Is it mostly Robert E. Jackson, the collector from Seattle, who chose to buy this picture and all the others in the show? Or is his credit shared with all the scavengers and scouts who brought these snapshots to the market so that Jackson could collect them? (In his essay in the catalogue, he thanks dealers by the score.) And what of Sarah Greenough, the gallery's senior curator of photographs, a gatekeeper of sorts, who let "Mary Girow's Cadillac" enter her museum? When you stare into the picture, the redness of its cup is not the only thing you notice. Her sure curatorial judgment shines in there as well.

"The National Gallery of Art," she reminds us in the catalogue, "is not in the habit of celebrating bad works of art."

But when it comes to gauging snapshots, how does one decide? What makes a snapshot good? What makes a snapshot bad? Selecting good Vermeers is not much of a problem. It's a lot harder with photographs that are anonymous and common. By 1977, Americans were snapping nearly 9 billion pictures a year. And this exhibition surveys not just one year, but 90. Think of all the sequenced sieves these pictures had to pass through to get into the show.

I once heard Andy Warhol address the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Well, he didn't exactly address them, he wanly took some questions. "What photographs do you like best?" one committee member asked. "Um . . . ," replied the artist, "the ones they forget to pick up at the Fotomat." Something of his vision -- his preference for the shiny, his consumeristic deadpan -- is summoned by that photograph. Warhol's in there, too.

Other noted artists flicker in the show. When you look into its highway scenes, and pictures shot through windshields, memories of road trips fly by. Jack Kerouac. Robert Frank. Here a moustached man seizes a small boy, swings him by the ankles and seems about to dash his head against a tree. What was probably, in fact, merely backyard horseplay assumes in this art context the darkness of Diane Arbus's grotesques.

Hollywood as well sneaks into these snapshots. Here's a 1930s sleeping beauty dozing in the hospital, photographed surreptitiously, with every hair in place. When you see her in her loveliness what you think of isn't sickness, but old romantic films.

Photography was once dismissed as overly mechanical, as not quite real art, but those days have long passed. Just pick up any standard history of photography and riffle through its pictures. The aesthetic of the snapshot -- its suddenness, its artlessness -- is part of what you'll see. It's there in Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Gary Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange. It's key to street photography. And to Andy Warhol's party shots. Did the canon of great photographs subtly inspire the nobody photographers encountered in this show, or -- which seems as likely -- was it the other way around?

Snapshots snap, they're fast. The very word suggests something swift, unplanned, instinctive -- a hip-shot with a rifle or the closing of a mousetrap or a trout's bite at a fly. Still, many of the strongest pictures on display aren't fast at all, but slow.

What slows them is the double take, the picture-shifting detail that you see not at first glimpse, but at second or third glance. In one memorable silver print taken around 1900-1910, it is noticing the camera, the one that took the picture, deep within a mirror. Here, from 1910, is a seated portrait of a dog, a cat, a baby. The double take arrives when you see the face of Mom through the back slats of a chair.

In another striking picture, a man crouches in wonder as a monstrous insect hovers overhead. No, it's not an insect, but a motorcycle, blurred, soaring through the air. It is only when you've read its wheels and their spokes that you notice something stranger, the black pistol inexplicably in the observer's hand.

This culled and curious show engrosses. The more you see its snapshots, the more you make your peace with the elusive, compound ghost who brought us these pictures: It isn't just one being, it's everyone who's ever stopped to snap a picture, and all the lessons taught by the movies and Life magazine. It's the collector and the curator and all of us together, all of us at once.

Just as the invention of the phonograph put front-parlor music-making within reach of folks who'd never dare to hold forth at the piano, the development of inexpensive cameras that used roll film democratized the making of pictures.

And though it took about a century for the turntable to be recognized as a musical instrument, the family camera won some respect reasonably quickly.

Just not in the hallowed halls of Art.

Even with fine-art photography, the National Gallery was fairly late to the table, inaugurating its photography department in 1990, the year after it observed the medium's sesquicentennial.

Hobbyist shutterbugging took a little bit longer to win approval.

The selling point of "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson" is that while amateur work may not be polished, that isn't to say it's unschooled. Many homegrown picture-takers received solid instruction at the foot of popular culture.

Some of the show's most revealing moments fall at the intersection of visual expression and musical taste. The unknown lovers in a century-old shot marked "??" are nestled in a bower of phrases, many of them snatches of popular song, from the title of "When You First Kiss the Last Girl You Love" to a quote from "Love Me, and the World Is Mine" and a playful riff on "Bedelia." Constructing romantic identity from music-industry tropes is nothing new.

Another couple, who play with ghost images in a pair of turn-of-the century snaps, each fading from the frame in turn, appear to have his-and-hers songs. On the music stand of the spinet are copies of "My Love With Golden Hair" and "Whistling Rufus." The latter is still performed today at old-time music festivals, only without its casually racist lyric.

The link between household imagery and the iconography of popular music can only be inferred from a 1978 Polaroid in which a woman on the cusp of old age flips the bird to the photographer, her upraised finger a tidy rhyme with the full-size candle jabbed in her birthday cake.

She's just gotta be a Johnny Cash fan.

--Glenn Dixon (Express, October 18, 2007)