It came as a familiar burglar of my attention, as I sat sorting through photo albums. I
remembered how we acted like spies, sending covert information in self-destructing parcels,
intercepted only by the shameful act of screenshotting. Indignant, I watched that hollow ghost
drift by, in a mist of smarm and lemon-drop yellow.
Taking photos—an instinctual human gesture. It’s impossible to imagine their absence, a time
when time could not be recorded and printed and revisited (or uploaded, to our lifelong
construction of a mausoleum in the cloud). Susan Sontag called photography a ‘mass art form’,
it’s almost antisocial to reject the activity; she gives the example of not taking photos of one’s
children growing up, which some would almost consider neglect
The camera obscura was the first attempt to generate an image, albeit ephemeral, hypothesised
in the years BC. But it was not until the 1820s, that the unpronounceable Nicéphore Niépce
engraved the first photograph, drawing on lithographic techniques and the light of a camera
obscura. It was an anthropological milestone, our first encounter with what Roland Barthes
called ‘messages without a code’; a representation which exists beyond ideological and
authorial intent.
I swipe right. Each name evokes an abandoned digital back-and-forth. The fleshy walls are
gone, architectural ribs exposed. It smells of decay. The passing domesticity that once endured,
erased by design. Laughter, argument, heartbreak. Wispy traces echo in these deserted rooms.
It was an event with a distinctive before-and-after in the collective consciousness, the invention
of both time travel and teleportation. Sontag says the promise of photography was to
‘democratize all experiences by translating them into images’. It’s now our technology-given
right to see through the eyes of others, as well as to gaze in high-definition at the youthful faces
of our now-dead relatives, friends, selves.
Nothing could be more divorced from the chemical, mechanical, frustrating process of early
photographic image-making, than Snapchat’s simple user interface. But it’s not the divide of
difficulty which should concern us, Kodak made shooting easy enough in 1888; ‘You press the
button, we do the rest’. The problem then, is rather the assertion that Snapchat—and all the
platforms which have duplicated its distinctive features— can be said to produce photographs
at all, as we know them. The nomenclature doesn’t apply, it’s like comparing a light bulb to the
sun, because both vaguely house and project light.
Am I being followed? I dart my eyes back at the slightest movement. The grinning automatons –
the bitmojis, dare I speak their name – are unnerving, like at any moment they might break
from their tableaux, find my house on Snap Map and violate me.
We should think about this in terms of use, and function. Snapchat is a particularly crude
interpretation of one modern and one lost art: photography and correspondence. We’ll focus on
the former in this admittedly hasty argument.
One must think of the Snap-Image as a social production, rather than a work of art or
preservation. The experience is diametrically opposite to Niépce’s breakthrough, but resembles
the ephemeral images first produced in the camera obscura. Recorded not for posterity, these
images exist to be seen and abruptly destroyed.
Like Wittgenstein argued for language, photography can be defined by its use, it is a means
with many opposing ends. But this strain of communicative photography has splintered from
its photographic lineage.
In a bizarre reimaging of McLuhan’s words, the medium is now literally the message. The
photo is a visual sketch for a linguistic purpose, an acting-out in a game of online charades.
Back and forth, images go, sometimes with text, sometimes saying enough on their own. The
form becomes meaningless, replaced by pure subject and perspective: this is what I’m seeing,
where you are, who I’m with, this is an image with a dog filter to cover your nose, an image of
my ceiling to maintain our messaging streak, a picture of the blue sky—only there as wallpaper
for your paragraph placed above it. The photograph loses its final materiality and becomes
material for collage and décollage, while impersonating authentic experience. For Sontag,
photography claims an ‘instant access to the real’, but to ‘possess the world in the form of
images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real’. Snapchat facilitates a cyclical unending unreality, but stops short of possession, so that we can’t even sit
and contemplate the simulacra, we are swept up by its flow.
I scroll down, stumbling into the tomb which Snap Inc. calls Memories. It starts with school
uniforms, faces distorted or bearing animalistic veils. It descends in a vertical flood of
embarrassment. Friends looking to the camera with eager confusion. Enthralling concerts
broken up into unwatchable chunks of light-speckled noise. Videos panoramically drift over the
geography of a party, surveying unwitting subjects. The latter do well to follow Sontag’s
dictum, that good citizens of a ‘camera culture’ ‘pretend not to notice when one is being
photographed’.
Despite the app’s conceit, there is a storage function. Does this dismantle our entire theory of
Snapchat as operating uniquely? Rather, the incongruity is resolved when we think of its cloud
storage as a response to the act of photography, which Snapchat enables, rather than the storing
of photography itself. The leftovers found in Memories are traces of lost communication, letters and flyers stored in a library’s ephemera collection. Photographs, no matter how well-
planned, reach for the beyond and pull back the unexpected. The Snap-Image, alternatively, is always created, received, and saved with a code.
I can delete this overflow of imagery, right? But isn’t it wrong to delete a photo once it’s
taken? It feels like I’m scrubbing evidence from the historical record or tearing up a piece of
art. To delete is sin.
Perhaps we ought to follow Snapchat’s philosophy of ephemerality. Treat the app as one long
disappearing message, its obliteration always predetermined, the timer in the corner reaching
its climax.
Photography has been morally dubious from the outset. ‘Images transfix, they anesthetize’.
Imagery has numbed our sensory ability, narrowed our faculties to the visual, submerged us in
a deluge of images whose veracity and psychological impact is proving more difficult to fix.
But for all the failings and dangers of image-making, there is a spiritual or sentimental
satisfaction, an aesthetic fulfillment, a historicist impetus to taking photos. Snapchat strips
those ambitions away, degrades the act into the primal desire to hunt down experience, shoot it
dead, and show off its carcass to our friends. Whatever remains of the integrity of the image
dissipates with the Snap-Image, and it takes language and experience with it.
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