Rizzoli is publishing a new book Shoot: Photography of the Moment, a survey of informal, snapshot-style photography by Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans and other pioneers of the style, presented alongside the best new practitioners.  Shore wrote the foreword to the book, which includes essays by London College of Fashion professor Penny Martin and Ken Miller, the book’s author, who considers the snapshot medium’s history and explains its current vibrancy and popularity.
    
Miller recently spoke with PDN about why he created the book, why the medium’s new generation of photographers deserve more attention from the fine art establishment, and why snapshot photography may be entering its “decadent phase.”

PDN: How did you first get interested in snapshot photography as a subject?

Ken Miller: For a few years I was the editor of Tokion, and because it was a small indie magazine, I kind of by default ended up being a photo editor. The book is really the byproduct of me educating myself in terms of what I liked. What I realized that I liked, no so much in photography but photographers, was the ability to go into a situation and interact with it dynamically. For a new magazine like Tokion…we didn’t have time with [subjects] to do these big setups. So I developed a real respect for photographers who could walk into a room and make an image; interact with the subject, interact with whatever the situation was, and make something that was striking and interesting.

PDN: So the book gathers together people who you feel are good at that?

KM: It goes beyond that. Point and shoot photography as a style has definitely been trendy for a decade at this point. These guys were getting lots of commercial work and fashion work. They were pretty much the leading photographers in terms of magazine editorial, and a couple of folks, like [Wolfgang] Tillmans and [Juergen] Teller and Nan [Goldin found] gallery representation. I just didn’t feel like [the younger snapshot-style photographers] were getting the fine art props they deserved. I was a little confused by that. And actually I’m still confused by that. I was fortunate because it gave me the opportunity to do this book, but in a way I’m surprised that nobody’s done it before.

PDN: In her essay for the book, Penny Martin writes that the snapshot format has been reinvigorated “by a new generation of image-makers who find the expediency and fluidity of informal imagery ideally suited to the pace and tone of online portfolios and blogs”? Why has the Internet played such a huge role in the reinvigoration of the snapshot?

KM: Part of it is that the Internet has radically changed our relationship to photography and who is a photographer—you could say the same thing happened with writing—in part because the tools were suddenly so available.
    
We can all shoot digital now, we can all post stuff to Flickr, we can all be photographers. Part of this has led to a renaissance in snapshot, and I think it’s led to people not just being photographers but also becoming curators. Obviously this isn’t universally true, but when people start posting to Flickr they start becoming aware that their work is being viewed by other people and then they start editing, and they become aware of the importance of editing as part of the photographic process, that it’s not just taking the picture, it’s selecting which picture you want to show. You’re having to interact with the quality of the snapshot and decide that one is better than the other, and that inevitably leads to an actual mediation into the quality of the snapshot, and I think that’s what’s reinvigorated it.

PDN: Do you feel the Web is also a perfect venue for viewing this type of photograph?

KM: Yes and no. The thing what’s tricky about the Web is volume. It’s really easy to lose things. I still like print, maybe I’m an old fogey like that, but a lot of what I think is interesting about these photographers is that they’re taking photos that look like casual photography, but they’re doing it deliberately and they’re selecting it deliberately. [When you decide] to print something, you’re investing money, you’re deciding this is what goes in a magazine or a book or up on a wall, and so if you have that self-curatorial impulse, I think [print is] the next step.

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.



PDN: Is it possible in your opinion for a single snapshot to provide the various rewards that a more formal fine-art photograph can provide?

KM: Yes. There are some photos in this book that I find incredibly beautiful, and a lot of snapshot photos have stood the test of time. I think that a lot of high-production, fine art photography runs the greater risk of looking really dated, because it’s often about the production process and the technology, and announcing the importance of the photograph by the tools that were used to make it. If you’re the first person to heavily digitally manipulate photographs, in a few years those start to look a little corny. Whereas Nan Goldin’s self portrait with a black eye, that photograph is over 25 years old and still has the impact that it did when it first came out. Stephen Shore’s snapshots from driving across America to me still speak volumes. And then there’s more recent stuff—a photograph by Paul Schiek of a hand holding a bird by a window [washed out with a flash]—everything about the photograph is wrong, and I’m just entranced.

PDN: So why are the younger practitioners not receiving the recognition that the older snapshot photographers do?

KM: It’s a couple of things. Casual fans are only going to remember a couple of names, so if you’re one of the first couple of names to enter into the public dialogue that’s who people remember. So if you’re Nan Goldin or Juergen Teller, people know their names to reference them. I think finally some of the younger folks—somebody like Tim [Barber] would be a good example, or Dash [Snow] was a good example–have started to push their way into the conversation also.

PDN: Does it also have to do with the fact that the valuation of that older snapshot photography preceded the current flood of imagery?

KM: Yes, and I think what’s interesting with the younger photographers is that you see two strains happening. One set are really engaging with the beauty of snapshot photography—I think some of Tim [Barber’s] stuff is really beautiful; some of Glynnis [McDaris’s] stuff is really pretty. And then you have some people who are making themselves a character. Dash [Snow] was making himself a character in the way that Juergen Teller and Nan Goldin did, but much more self-consciously. What I thought was really interesting was they were really blurring the line between how much of this is real and how much of this is staged. Then folks like Jason Nocito—I honestly didn’t get [Jason’s work] at first, because what he’s doing is, he’s really engaging with the volume of images that are out there. He’s cranking out images like there’s no tomorrow, and a lot of them, when I first look at them I’m baffled: a crack in the sidewalk and then a donut and then a Coke can. And then I was like, “Oh, you’re actually commenting on how much of this stuff we’re getting bombarded with, and forcing us to actually look at all of this stuff again,” and I think that’s really interesting.

PDN: Are more and more amateur photographers going to be able to gain audiences in the way that bloggers who are not professional writers have been able to?

KM: I think they will, but what it does is it takes photography away from being about the tools, and more about the person taking the photograph. For a long time photography has been in this stage where you were evaluating whether somebody was a good writer or not based on the typewriter.
    
There is a double-edged sword to working in the style: it’s really easy to dismiss by saying, “Oh anyone can do that.” Whereas I think the real answer is that everybody has the tools, and anybody can sometimes pull off a photo like many of the photos in the book either intentionally or unintentionally, but I think we all know from taking our own digital photographs, that it’s actually pretty hard to take a really satisfying photo, one that’s interesting and has emotional qualities to it. The original subtitle for the book was Photography and the Ephemeral Image, and I’m still enamored with that idea: once you get past the tools you start engaging with the ephemeral. How is it you’re able to take interesting photos using really basic tools on a regular basis?

PDN: Do you think lowering these boundaries is going to have a corrosive effect on the fine art market for snapshot photography?

KM: I think that’s tricky. If you’re a photographer who consistently produces images that look good big hung up on the wall in a gallery, then your work is going to have value. If you hit a home run every once in a while, but most of the time you can’t, your work is probably not going to make it off the Web. Right now I think a lot of snapshot photography is valued based on the production process.

Photography has always been an immature medium in relationship to fine art. You have this problem with multiples, all that. And one of the ways it’s given itself value is: a Gursky photo is valuable because it’s huge. If Gursky’s work was postcard-sized, would it have the same value? Probably not. I have a really big print of a Jason Nocito photo that he gave me years ago, that thing is amazing looking. The guy cranks out photos that would look amazing really big and put on a wall. And I think once you’re able to do that then your work has value.

PDN: Do you think the snapshot esthetic is more at home in a book than it is on a gallery wall?

KM: I think photography in general is more at home in book form than it is on a gallery wall. I think books are the greatest things that ever happened to photography. Gallery shows of photography, to me, 99 percent of the time, fall flat. I think photos often gain power by accumulation. I love photo books.

PDN: In his introduction to Shoot, Stephen Shore writes, “The ephemeral image’s energy, like that of the snapshot, comes from its incompleteness—its notational quality. And like notation it grows by accumulation.” Are these informal-style photos best looked at in quantity?

KM: I think that helps them a lot. But I don’t think that’s universally true. Yes, I think having a collection of them you can gain sometimes, but I think often times printing a single photograph out and printing it up big, I think some of the photographs in the book deserve that attention. So I don’t have a clear answer on that.