The snapshot has a longstanding connotation of inferiority. Even if you enjoy making them, you probably acknowledge this apparent consensus, and perhaps even feel guilty about owning up to taking snapshots. This would be a mistake, for to assume that a snapshot must be a bad photograph is to miss what a snapshot is: not a photograph made badly, but a photograph not made according to convention. If anyone should give you a hard time about the process, tell them that. At worst it will make you sound like a hipster, looking for a style to adopt before it becomes cool. At best, they will realize that you want to make photographs that have not been made hundreds of times before.
This is key. If we do not allow ourselves to make images that fall outside of the known, we will never make surprising photographs. Still more, we will never know what kind of photograph really moves us, or arrests us, reengages us with the unexpectedness and vitality of life.
Indeed, our first snapshots may not be any good. But that is normal when getting into a new genre or style, and, since you are a photographer, you will find ways to make your snapshots artistic, and to express yourself through them. I do not devote a lot of time to this concern because it isn’t concerning to me. The problem of how to take snapshots from basic captures of anything which moves us to photograph it to a level of capital-A Art is the one problem that cannot really be addressed, for if I were to do so, I would inevitably create a practice built around the snapshot aesthetic, which is not where I want the reader to go.
The snapshot aesthetic seeks to incorporate blemishes, misfocus and the like, and to portray a hazy, nostalgic view of life. It lacks the immediacy and vitality of honest snapshooting. In addition, the effects are mostly added in post-processing, making the images more the product of sitting at a computer or adding filters from a smartphone, and not true field experience.
The problem of how to make our snapshots “good” instead of just “snapshots” only arises because we have decided to shoot snapshots. If we were shooting street photographs, or portraits, or nature or reportage or anything else, we would have many examples of what everybody considers to be “good” genre examples. There would not be a problem of what “good” even is, we would just have to choose which interpretation of “good” suited our individual tastes and then seek to emulate (even improve upon, perhaps) those established guidelines. As it stands, we have no idea what good snapshots, what our good snapshots, are.
The real strength of the snapshot is that it places you on this untrodden path. It is a path which can keep you busy, which can surprise you. It has kept me busy for a while, and I don’t think I have arrived at any satisfactory answer yet. There may be no hard and fast answer for me, nor for you. But the journey is the destination, as they say. Experience is gold, and experience which leads you down your own road instead of the roads everyone else has traveled is platinum. To quote the well-known lines from poet Robert Frost,
“I took the road less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.”
The Sprocket Docket 