Photographs, diaries, snapshots

I was talking with my friend Neil the other day. He said he was shooting after a funeral, in order to have some sort of memory of the even happening at all, and that people were most surprised of this. Somehow, the function of photographs to be reminders of events seems to be fading, slightly... it doesn't come up as the first thing in most people's minds when asking why do they take pictures. Everything goes faster. The diaries are uploaded on facebook and they are massive collections of snapshots, compared to those big books we used to have before, which due to sheer size had to be somehow edited down (and on which the events would be written down). Also, I have the feeling that the photographer himself is more self aware nowadays when shooting. If you check flickr, you'll see that lots of people that shoot daily life diaries have either an explicit or implicit artistic presumption. The thing photographed has to produce an artistic result that is greater than the thing photographed. Back in the day, when you took holiday photographs, the circle of people you shared them with was small. This lead to some unpretentious gems. Maybe the attitude to photography (by photographers) will not bring these back.

I probably wouldn't have noticed this if I had not been sailing through 70's and 80's snapshots in flickr. Rarely anybody takes photographs like these anymore. Some work amazingly well. The photographer is slightly on the shade, and the subject is well delivered through a rich composition. Some of my favourites come from the archives of Harald Hauesler:









These are from 1962 Familie Kramer.

Elsewhere: art and artlessness

I just read this entry in the B blog (what's with all these letters?). I quite much enjoyed this bit when Blake writes about a group snapshot taken 21 years ago in the small village he is from:

"This particular photo seems to support that idea that the more "artful" a photographer attempts to be --the more referential and self-conscious-- the more quickly it is forgotten, while photographers who record reality in less stylized documentary way eventually gain recognition. Some of the greatest photographers of all time --Watkins, Jackson, Atget, Disfarmer, etc-- didn't think of themselves as artists so much as documentary recorders. The recognition as art came later, as artlessness became arty."

The picture he talks about is actually quite cute. It would be nice to see two dozens on the same line by now... but who knows where they're buried. I guess that with the ability of people to delete the crap from their digital cameras, thousands of potential future artworks are lost every week. Will we never see the proof of people picking their noses in school pictures again? Damn.

Bedtime, I managed to arrange greasy breakfast for tomorrow.