Autobiography and the Snapshot Aesthetic: An exploration of the Visual Diarists
I was first introduced to the style of subjective documentary photography in secondary school, after my art teacher brought in her copy of Corinne Day’s Diary (2000) to show me. I had, up until that point, been intrigued by the book Hiromix (1998), a collection of largely self-portrait documentary snapshots by the eponymous Japanese photographer. The teacher’s only intention in showing me Diary had been to illustrate the stark contrasts possible between these different documentary practitioners. However, I was instantly gripped by the concept and intensity of Day’s book, which consequently dawned an acknowledgement of the photograph’s power as a preservative and mirror to reality.
The same teacher went on to introduce me, with much scepticism due to my age, to the work of Nan Goldin, one of the most significant photographers in the field of snapshot autobiography and a huge liberator in terms of my own perception of the medium.
It is important to acknowledge that the snapshot approach to photography is not an innovation that emerged alongside these ‘visual diarists’. The style came to prominence largely thanks to the development of the M series Leica, which was discreet and unobtrusive in size, and pioneered by forerunners such as Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank in the mid-twentieth century, through their subjectively anarchistic photojournalism.
It is significant however, that later practitioners such as Goldin and Larry Clark implemented this style at a time when the photographic medium was being pushed further into mirroring the fictions of cinema through elaborately lit, staged scenarios, and being utilised more ambitiously than ever as a mass-marketing tool. A tie that Goldin would later denounce as ‘reprehensible and evil’ (Garratt, Sheryl. The Observer. ‘The Dark Room’, 6/01/2002) after her work inadvertently helped spawn the ‘heroin-chic’ look of the early 90’s.
The essence of the snapshot is to capture and immortalise the briefest of moments and it is evident from examining Goldin’s work that the Leica camera’s minimal presence and noise output is advantageous in photographing an emotionally charged unadulterated reality. In her early work, which culminated to create The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), this aesthetic is used to document and explore the lives of her friends and by extension herself in prolific uncensored depth. The unflinching depictions of a bohemian subculture consistent of ‘third gender’ queens, drug addiction and homosexuality, shot almost exclusively on colour transparency film, brought Goldin to prominence in the1980’s.
While these photographs, in their colour saturated naturally lit ambience, are unquestionably beautiful it is also the idea and the tenderness behind them that prevails. The name captions that underpin each image give the viewer, by the end, a sense of empathy and knowledge about the people depicted, which completely contradicts the objective detachment found in most other applications of the medium. And besides the fact that the world Goldin and her ‘family’ inhabit is alien to most of us, there is still an underlying relation in the photographs, between subject and viewer, of our emotional fluctuations as human beings. The consistency and persistence of Goldin’s project, alongside the apparent invisibility of her camera is what makes it so strikingly powerful.
In comparison to Goldin’s harsh, soul-bearing realities, the aforementioned Hiromix, offers the viewer a style of documentary that dwells in a realm more akin to that of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills.
Her award winning collection of photographs Seventeen Girl Days is a document of consistent self-reflection that attempts to portray the teenage fears and aspirations that emerge on the transitional cusp of adulthood. Though not as physically explicit as Goldin, Hiromix’s photographs were confrontational in terms of her own country’s cultural traditions. Self-portraits, often of herself clad only in underwear, epitomised a certain liberation in young Japanese women, and brought their emerging concept of the ‘teen-idol’ forward into the realm of photography.
Although in the same conceptual niche as that of Goldin and Day, post-Seventeen Girl Days Hiromix takes more deliberate involvement in how she is portrayed "People came to think of the photographs as being in the realm of `cute', and I didn't want that impression to continue… I wanted to do something different. I try to express myself as cool, reticent, a bit stand-offish. I try not to show too much of myself." (Lloyd Parry, Richard. The Independent, ‘Real People Interview- Hiromix’. 31/01/1999)
A consequence of this is evidently going to be a masking of Hiromix’s reality, which practitioners such as Goldin would strive to unveil. However it does succeed in showing us another side to the artist, the moody aloofness of the late adolescent, which of course, ultimately a stage in her autobiography.
At a glance, a Hiromix photograph could be misconstrued as a snapping by the average self-involved teenager, who seem to have emerged in force since the dawn of digital age. However, when considering the artists sequenced work, it’s evidently her ability to document both life’s most worthwhile moments, and ones of extreme mundanity in equal measure that makes her so intriguing. There is a sense of extreme worth in every photograph as she tries to communicate to the viewer that everything is passing, and that nothing in life is trivial.
Visual Diarists operate within private realms where they document first and foremost for themselves and their desire to preserve those whom they love and are close to. Gavin Watson, a British photographer whose first publication Skins (1994) came out in the mid-nineties, is no exception.
The difference with Watson’s work, as opposed to those previously mentioned however, is that the social and political climate of the time is as prominent as the subject in almost every photograph. The fashions and actions of those depicted mirror a cultural intensity that culminated in Britain’s working class under Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government.
Watson himself has stated in interviews that he thought nothing of the photographs’ significance at the time and they were but a product of his interest in the medium . However, tw
enty years on it is evident that his project is one not only of autobiographical merit, but also of era defining importance.
It is a coherent subjective documentation of the Skinhead movement, capturing and often dispelling misconceptions of what it was about. The post-introduction photograph in his book Skins and Punks: the lost archives (2008), depicts two skinheads, one with the other jokingly in a headlock, on one side of the frame. On the other, two middle-aged people are walking past with a seemingly deliberate aversion, conveying the outsiders’ perception of them. The book then goes on to document with an obvious warmth and celebration, the youth of these specific people at this specific time, displacing them completely from the external impressions one might consider them by.
Goldin, Day and Watson document a variety of people with whom they interact, but all three have a specific individual of prominent feature throughout their different projects. Watson has a clear inclination for photographing his younger brother Nev, who is both expressive and carries himself with an obvious photogenic quality. Day focuses on Tara whom she met in 1991 and documented consistently for Diary after an apparent self-exile from the fashion industry. And Goldin is famous for documenting her close friend Cookie Mueller up until Cookie’s death in 1989.
These primary subjects are inevitably so because they have a significant relationship with the artist or camera, but they also, as ‘main characters’, epitomise the themes around which the bulk of these visual diaries operate.
The aforementioned photographers’ documented lives are worlds away from what an average person would perceive to be normal, and even in the photographs that convey familiar elements of life’s mundanity, they never succeed in boring the viewer. It is the practitioners’ ability to make us care about their lives and these people that divides them from the ‘tourist’ notion of the snapshot.
So what is it precisely that makes the viewer care, or at least maintain intrigue about these very personalised works. First of all, it may be just that, the fact that these photographs are an insight into a very secular environment which we would otherwise know nothing about, (very much arousing that part of the human psyche that leads people to spy their neighbours over the garden fence). This alone however, could not warrant the massive and prolonged attention that has been given to these artists. It is also due to the peculiar meshing together of physical otherness with the sense of emotional familiarity that these photographs evoke.
Watson lived and photographed the bulk of his Skins book less than twenty miles away from my own hometown. And yet the photographs appear as an entirely different reality. There is a certain otherness about the young skinheads, children from the same class background as myself, all attired in the unison of their movement. However, looking past these differences there is also a sense of nostalgia in the photographs, about the essence of youth in and of itself.
The same can be said for Goldin, whose aforementioned Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an even greater step away from what would be considered normal, and yet even closer in terms of emotional relation. A strong example of this is the photograph Greer and Robert on the Bed, NYC, 1982, which depicts the eponymous characters sat on a bed in a squat like abode. The otherness of their world is evident by the brick-bare walls mounted with tattered theatre masks, and the rusted bed on which they sit. Greer is lying on her side, white in complexion and clutching her wrist, a
rousing the suspicion, but maintaining an ambiguity, of drug use. The scene as a whole is disturbing but in equal measure it is clearly one fraught with an emotional turmoil to which everyone can relate.
Robert is running his hand through his hair and looking off frame with an obvious intensity. Greer’s expression is sorrowful and self-involved, she’s lying away from Robert as if wanting to be alone. But most fascinating of all is that there is not even the slightest inclination that Goldin is present at this scene with her camera.
My inclination towards the medium of photography is largely to do with the aforementioned artists, with particular regard to Goldin and Day. It is entirely the capturing of reality that inspires me, and the constant pursuit of preserving lives through imag
e making.
Day’s photograph of a pregnant Tara considering herself in the bedroom mirror of her dingy squat is more powerful an image than could hope to be achieved through any kind of theatrical reconstruction or digital manipulation. It evokes a profound sadness to know that it is real, Tara is real, and that is her existence.
However, it is not through any desire to replicate the scenarios of this often tragic work that I am drawn to the autobiographical aspect of the medium. Nor is it through some socio-narcissism that I feel people should want to know about those with whom I am involved. But it is much more to do with a personal want of preservation due to a fear of loss or being forgotten that inspires my own practice.
I started my own, as of yet untitled project at the age of seventeen, but even in starting at this early age I lamentably sift through photographs by a fifteen year old Gavin Watson and resign to the fact that moments of my early teens have been lost forever.
Will Dawson
I was first introduced to the style of subjective documentary photography in secondary school, after my art teacher brought in her copy of Corinne Day’s Diary (2000) to show me. I had, up until that point, been intrigued by the book Hiromix (1998), a collection of largely self-portrait documentary snapshots by the eponymous Japanese photographer. The teacher’s only intention in showing me Diary had been to illustrate the stark contrasts possible between these different documentary practitioners. However, I was instantly gripped by the concept and intensity of Day’s book, which consequently dawned an acknowledgement of the photograph’s power as a preservative and mirror to reality.
The same teacher went on to introduce me, with much scepticism due to my age, to the work of Nan Goldin, one of the most significant photographers in the field of snapshot autobiography and a huge liberator in terms of my own perception of the medium.
It is important to acknowledge that the snapshot approach to photography is not an innovation that emerged alongside these ‘visual diarists’. The style came to prominence largely thanks to the development of the M series Leica, which was discreet and unobtrusive in size, and pioneered by forerunners such as Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank in the mid-twentieth century, through their subjectively anarchistic photojournalism.
It is significant however, that later practitioners such as Goldin and Larry Clark implemented this style at a time when the photographic medium was being pushed further into mirroring the fictions of cinema through elaborately lit, staged scenarios, and being utilised more ambitiously than ever as a mass-marketing tool. A tie that Goldin would later denounce as ‘reprehensible and evil’ (Garratt, Sheryl. The Observer. ‘The Dark Room’, 6/01/2002) after her work inadvertently helped spawn the ‘heroin-chic’ look of the early 90’s.
The essence of the snapshot is to capture and immortalise the briefest of moments and it is evident from examining Goldin’s work that the Leica camera’s minimal presence and noise output is advantageous in photographing an emotionally charged unadulterated reality. In her early work, which culminated to create The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), this aesthetic is used to document and explore the lives of her friends and by extension herself in prolific uncensored depth. The unflinching depictions of a bohemian subculture consistent of ‘third gender’ queens, drug addiction and homosexuality, shot almost exclusively on colour transparency film, brought Goldin to prominence in the1980’s.
While these photographs, in their colour saturated naturally lit ambience, are unquestionably beautiful it is also the idea and the tenderness behind them that prevails. The name captions that underpin each image give the viewer, by the end, a sense of empathy and knowledge about the people depicted, which completely contradicts the objective detachment found in most other applications of the medium. And besides the fact that the world Goldin and her ‘family’ inhabit is alien to most of us, there is still an underlying relation in the photographs, between subject and viewer, of our emotional fluctuations as human beings. The consistency and persistence of Goldin’s project, alongside the apparent invisibility of her camera is what makes it so strikingly powerful.
In comparison to Goldin’s harsh, soul-bearing realities, the aforementioned Hiromix, offers the viewer a style of documentary that dwells in a realm more akin to that of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills.
Her award winning collection of photographs Seventeen Girl Days is a document of consistent self-reflection that attempts to portray the teenage fears and aspirations that emerge on the transitional cusp of adulthood. Though not as physically explicit as Goldin, Hiromix’s photographs were confrontational in terms of her own country’s cultural traditions. Self-portraits, often of herself clad only in underwear, epitomised a certain liberation in young Japanese women, and brought their emerging concept of the ‘teen-idol’ forward into the realm of photography.
Although in the same conceptual niche as that of Goldin and Day, post-Seventeen Girl Days Hiromix takes more deliberate involvement in how she is portrayed "People came to think of the photographs as being in the realm of `cute', and I didn't want that impression to continue… I wanted to do something different. I try to express myself as cool, reticent, a bit stand-offish. I try not to show too much of myself." (Lloyd Parry, Richard. The Independent, ‘Real People Interview- Hiromix’. 31/01/1999)
A consequence of this is evidently going to be a masking of Hiromix’s reality, which practitioners such as Goldin would strive to unveil. However it does succeed in showing us another side to the artist, the moody aloofness of the late adolescent, which of course, ultimately a stage in her autobiography.
At a glance, a Hiromix photograph could be misconstrued as a snapping by the average self-involved teenager, who seem to have emerged in force since the dawn of digital age. However, when considering the artists sequenced work, it’s evidently her ability to document both life’s most worthwhile moments, and ones of extreme mundanity in equal measure that makes her so intriguing. There is a sense of extreme worth in every photograph as she tries to communicate to the viewer that everything is passing, and that nothing in life is trivial.
Visual Diarists operate within private realms where they document first and foremost for themselves and their desire to preserve those whom they love and are close to. Gavin Watson, a British photographer whose first publication Skins (1994) came out in the mid-nineties, is no exception.
The difference with Watson’s work, as opposed to those previously mentioned however, is that the social and political climate of the time is as prominent as the subject in almost every photograph. The fashions and actions of those depicted mirror a cultural intensity that culminated in Britain’s working class under Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government.
Watson himself has stated in interviews that he thought nothing of the photographs’ significance at the time and they were but a product of his interest in the medium . However, tw
enty years on it is evident that his project is one not only of autobiographical merit, but also of era defining importance.It is a coherent subjective documentation of the Skinhead movement, capturing and often dispelling misconceptions of what it was about. The post-introduction photograph in his book Skins and Punks: the lost archives (2008), depicts two skinheads, one with the other jokingly in a headlock, on one side of the frame. On the other, two middle-aged people are walking past with a seemingly deliberate aversion, conveying the outsiders’ perception of them. The book then goes on to document with an obvious warmth and celebration, the youth of these specific people at this specific time, displacing them completely from the external impressions one might consider them by.
Goldin, Day and Watson document a variety of people with whom they interact, but all three have a specific individual of prominent feature throughout their different projects. Watson has a clear inclination for photographing his younger brother Nev, who is both expressive and carries himself with an obvious photogenic quality. Day focuses on Tara whom she met in 1991 and documented consistently for Diary after an apparent self-exile from the fashion industry. And Goldin is famous for documenting her close friend Cookie Mueller up until Cookie’s death in 1989.
These primary subjects are inevitably so because they have a significant relationship with the artist or camera, but they also, as ‘main characters’, epitomise the themes around which the bulk of these visual diaries operate.
The aforementioned photographers’ documented lives are worlds away from what an average person would perceive to be normal, and even in the photographs that convey familiar elements of life’s mundanity, they never succeed in boring the viewer. It is the practitioners’ ability to make us care about their lives and these people that divides them from the ‘tourist’ notion of the snapshot.
So what is it precisely that makes the viewer care, or at least maintain intrigue about these very personalised works. First of all, it may be just that, the fact that these photographs are an insight into a very secular environment which we would otherwise know nothing about, (very much arousing that part of the human psyche that leads people to spy their neighbours over the garden fence). This alone however, could not warrant the massive and prolonged attention that has been given to these artists. It is also due to the peculiar meshing together of physical otherness with the sense of emotional familiarity that these photographs evoke.
Watson lived and photographed the bulk of his Skins book less than twenty miles away from my own hometown. And yet the photographs appear as an entirely different reality. There is a certain otherness about the young skinheads, children from the same class background as myself, all attired in the unison of their movement. However, looking past these differences there is also a sense of nostalgia in the photographs, about the essence of youth in and of itself.
The same can be said for Goldin, whose aforementioned Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an even greater step away from what would be considered normal, and yet even closer in terms of emotional relation. A strong example of this is the photograph Greer and Robert on the Bed, NYC, 1982, which depicts the eponymous characters sat on a bed in a squat like abode. The otherness of their world is evident by the brick-bare walls mounted with tattered theatre masks, and the rusted bed on which they sit. Greer is lying on her side, white in complexion and clutching her wrist, a
rousing the suspicion, but maintaining an ambiguity, of drug use. The scene as a whole is disturbing but in equal measure it is clearly one fraught with an emotional turmoil to which everyone can relate.Robert is running his hand through his hair and looking off frame with an obvious intensity. Greer’s expression is sorrowful and self-involved, she’s lying away from Robert as if wanting to be alone. But most fascinating of all is that there is not even the slightest inclination that Goldin is present at this scene with her camera.
My inclination towards the medium of photography is largely to do with the aforementioned artists, with particular regard to Goldin and Day. It is entirely the capturing of reality that inspires me, and the constant pursuit of preserving lives through imag
e making.Day’s photograph of a pregnant Tara considering herself in the bedroom mirror of her dingy squat is more powerful an image than could hope to be achieved through any kind of theatrical reconstruction or digital manipulation. It evokes a profound sadness to know that it is real, Tara is real, and that is her existence.
However, it is not through any desire to replicate the scenarios of this often tragic work that I am drawn to the autobiographical aspect of the medium. Nor is it through some socio-narcissism that I feel people should want to know about those with whom I am involved. But it is much more to do with a personal want of preservation due to a fear of loss or being forgotten that inspires my own practice.
I started my own, as of yet untitled project at the age of seventeen, but even in starting at this early age I lamentably sift through photographs by a fifteen year old Gavin Watson and resign to the fact that moments of my early teens have been lost forever.
Will Dawson
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