The Low Museum: 4x6
By Logan Lockner
We take photographs every day.In the past seven hours I have taken at least 25 and received almost as many, and this has been an entirely unremarkable day — remarkable only, perhaps, in how uninteresting and pedestrian it was. As any reader with an iPhone can likely guess, the majority of these photos were taken, sent or received and then ostensibly deleted (if not already insidiously captured in a screenshot) by Snapchat.In The New Inquiry earlier this year, social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson celebrated Snapchat as an inaugural manifestation of temporary photography, which he suggests “is in part a response to social-media users’ feeling saddled with the distraction of documentary vision. It rejects the burden of creating durable proof that you are here and you did that ... By leaving the present where you found it, temporary photographs feel more like life and less like its collection.”In this sense, Snapchat and the genre of temporary photography it represents would seemingly refute — or at least a resist — Susan Sontag’s indictment of the medium in her 1977 book On Photography. She writes, “Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash fixed forever,” and then insists, “Photographs are.”In our current moment, however, as many of us are equipped with Snapchat and Instagram and HDR cameras that we carry within a single device in our pockets, questions about the significance of a photograph are more difficult to answer than ever before. A primary issue is the sheer volume of photographs one encounters on a daily basis, the inundating visual presence of the archive we are all collectively constructing.When he wrote Camera Lucida in 1980, Roland Barthes was primarily reacting to photographs as received cultural objects: “I see pho-tographs everywhere, like everyone else, nowadays; they come from the world to me, without my asking.”Over 30 years later, this is still the case; unbidden images erupt with-out interruption on the multitude of screens we encounter, usually from the first moment we wake until — beside the faded screens of our iPhones — we drift back to slumber.Sontag claims that a photograph “turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” and goes as far as to call photography “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
Today, these comments can easily be dismissed as the needless worries of a 20th-century Luddite, but in some ways, our present technological moment goes beyond any apocalyptic future Sontag and Barthes could have foreseen.The tyrannical impulse to photograph, to fossilize particular moments of life, to separate significant images from insignificant ones, has enlisted us all in its service. It is effectively impossible to not be self-conscious about photography in the 21st century. Our best available defense against the omnipresent gaze of others — some of whom we know, others of whom may be entirely foreign individuals or institutions — is to return, or at least threaten to return, our own photographic gaze.On a Monday night earlier this year, the Low Museum in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward hosted a 4x6 photo swap. The event’s description on Facebook read:
“There is no requirement for the photographs other than the standard 4x6 size. Everyone's prints will be placed on a large platform together.Bring as many as you wantView as many as you wantTake as many as you wantFREE”
I printed four photos of my own to bring to the swap, all of which were originally taken on my iPhone. Upon arriving at the Low Museum, I joined the small circle of people gathered around the square platform in the center of the space. I sheepishly removed the four photographs from the brown paper bag I carried them in and shuffled them into the pile of 4x6s littered across the platform.Almost instantly, another one of the participants snatched up a photo I had deposited, a snapshot of a sleeping friend of mine awash in cool blue light and entirely hidden save for a foot protruding from underneath a blanket.This stranger had never met my friend, had no idea of the emotional or even physical context in which the photo was taken, and yet he crooned, “Oooh, I love this one,” and greedily claimed it for himself.Naturally I knew this is how the event would proceed, but I couldn’t help but feel — as Sontag says in On Photography — violated, as if I had offered to a complete stranger some secret knowledge of that early- morning moment I had surreptitiously shared with my friend.Despite this initial revulsion, I also suddenly felt an irresistible sense of kinship with this stranger. He too had seen that this moment I captured was special and worth saving.
Of course, I also gathered photos: one of a glamorous old woman on Madison Avenue in the early 1990s, one I was told was the ex-terior of a Pakistani temple, one of the Majestic Diner on Ponce.When I held a photo of another old woman, this one framed in a close-up with platinum hair, dangling earrings, and beetle-like sunglasses, a girl standing beside me said casually, “That’s my grandmother.” It was comment offered in passing, not particularly possessive, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder what minute transgression or affirmation I had committed by selecting this particular photo.Was it that this old woman reminded me of my own grandmother, that the backyard landscape behind her could have been that of my childhood? I would never know this woman or her name, and yet I felt entitled to the spirit of voyeurism that allowed me to slip the photo of her into my brown paper bag.Exchanging personal snapshots with strangers around a square platform is a surreal transaction of intimate impulses and unspoken memories. It seems egregiously rude but also completely natural.Exchanging photographs with strangers is, after all, what we do every day.
