Lost and Found: Orphaned Family Photos as Art

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A faded photograph of a young girl holding a baby bird in her hand stands in a frame on my dining room table. I bought it for a dollar last summer at a roadside antique shop somewhere in Maine. According to a handwritten note on the back, the girl is caring for the rescued bird, which had somehow ended up in the heart of the desert—“something that the people at the station had never heard of before. He was only a fledgling and evidently got lost.”

Like any good work of art, the picture raises more questions than it answers: Who and where is the girl in the plain dress? What is “the station”? Did the girl or the bird ever leave the desert? I've gathered over a hundred anonymous family snapshots like this one, almost all of them black-and-white, taken between 1930 and 1970, and all of them full of alluring possibilities and mysteries: Who are these proud parents, picnicking families, friends by the lake? How did these treasured family mementos end up in an antique store or a swap show?

Orphaned family snapshots are increasingly being elevated beyond their bargain-bin destinies. Collectors and photography dealers are taking an interest in these vernacular works. Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Other Pictures, a show of anonymous snapshots drawn from the collection of the illustrious photo historian Thomas Walther, last year.

The introduction of easy-to-use, portable snapshot cameras, first produced by Kodak in 1888, led ordinary people to begin documenting their lives in pictures. (Formal studio portraiture was still sought out for special occasions.) But according to Richard Chalfen, a visual anthropologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, family snapshots are anything but representative of real life. In his research, Chalfen concluded that people use snapshots, videos, and home movies to construct an idealized visual record of how they want to be remembered—enjoying the good life, doing things right.

In Western cultures, “Kodak moments” tend to fall into obvious groupings: happy social events shared with kin; proud new possessions like cars, houses, and boats; athletic events and teams; and moments of public acknowledgment like graduations or award ceremonies. Snapshooters avoid recording commonplace activities like sleeping, watching TV, or cleaning the house. Given the amount of time spent earning a living, surprisingly few photos are taken of people at work. Nor do people document dramatic experiences like divorce, illness, death, and poverty. It adds up to a highly selective visual trail, yet people still see their photo albums as their lives in sum.

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