‘It’s just a snapshot. It’s not taken with a proper camera.’
Last week, this was the response to my appreciation of a friend’s riverside dawn photograph taken on his phone. The suggestion was that his lowly snapshot was not a proper photo.
The snapshot is much older than your grandma’s Instamatic. It is 170 years old and arose from Kodak bringing photography to the masses with the slogan ‘You press the button – We do the rest’. In this move, Kodak took photography out of the hands of professionals and indelibly linked informality with photographic truth. Kodak cameras became hugely popular. So the snapshot plays a vital role in the history and evolution of photography.
Today the snapshot remains important. Take a look at Yasumi’s Super Ordinary Life if you don’t believe it is a serious art genre with a huge following. We are all taking more snapshots than ever – 350 million are loaded onto Facebook each day.
Ok, so there are lots of snapshots, and they’ve been around for years. But what makes a ‘proper’ photo?
In terms of picture quality, your phone camera probably produces much better images than the professional ones of yesteryear. So it’s hard to simply dismiss the camera phone on that basis.
The camera – any camera – is an astonishing time machine. It can teleport you back to a place and time. I loved hearing my friend describe how, as a keen angler, he was often on the riverbank at dawn to photograph that magical moment when the sky reveals a kaleidoscope of fleeting colours and a new day blinks itself into existence.
Indeed, timing can be everything. Henri Cartier-Bresson famously coined the phrase’ the decisive moment’ when he was creating some of the most admired photos in history. My friend also chose the perfect moment to capture the sky reflected in the millpond-still water, contrasted against an inky dark river bank.
He modestly deflected my great enthusiasm for his ‘snapshot’ by saying that a professional with a good camera would have done a much better job.
I concede that an expensive camera could have better resolution (useful for big enlargements, but neither here nor there when looking on a phone). It would also probably have had better tonal graduation, highlight and shadow detail, thanks to its larger sensor. The taker would have had more control over depth of field, noise/sensitivity and shutter speed. They would also have been able to choose a wider or longer lens to frame the shot without losing quantity, as is often associated with a phone’s ‘digital zoom’. Finally, software and filters would have allowed him to boost the colour saturation and contrast to make the image really ‘pop’ off the page.
I’d argue that these things just make it technically a better photo. Isn’t the content more important? When I look at any photograph I look for meaning. Do you prefer looking at captivating images that move you more than boring, technically perfect, ones? I thought so. Me too. In this way, you create a narrative that is ‘about’ something, not just ‘of’ something – this, for example.
By these measures, my modest friend had produced a great photograph. I could see that it teleported him right back to that quiet moment on the river bank. I could sense how, in that instant, he was touched by nature’s amazing show and had reached for his camera phone to preserve it. It’s successful as an image because it can also communicate that special moment to me and I wasn’t even there. I could imagine being there. He was kind enough to share it here so you can imagine being there too.
We’re all photographers now, thanks to Kodak, iPhones and Instagram. We’ve documented wars so that people get to know the truth. We’ve been eyewitnesses to world events and can all relive those favourite moments we can never possibly recreate. All thanks to snapshots.
Finally, thank you to whoever took this snapshot of a random street in Derbyshire a century ago. To me this is a wonderful photograph. Because I live in one of the houses on it.
Thank goodness for snapshots.
Thanks to Po for the main image, used with permission.