You Snap: We Do the Rest

That perky slogan that Kodak used in the 1880’s to sell their Brownie cameras turns out to be an epistemological tangle. Frank Rich used a photo of a group of young people “lounging” on the Brooklyn waterfront against a distant backdrop of the smoky disaster of the fallen World Trade Center on 9/11. He chided their “complacency” as “shocking” in the face of a calamity. Wrong.

And the paradoxes that ensued as the German photographer who took the shot and the Brooklyn couple “lounging” with ambient strangers tell the truer story of that “simple” snapshot: It warns us not to oversimplify the complex network of daily modern media. SLATE runs this exemplary untangling in its “Arts and Life” section for Saturday, 16 September 2006.

SLATE writer David Plotz started this polylogue with an essay questioning the reading that Frank Rich gave the image; and invited the unknown “complacents” to tell their sides of the photo. Forty year old artist Walter Sipser responded first, with two mugshots establishing without a doubt that he was the man on the right end of the photo. (He thanked the commentators for calling him “young!") And established as well that the twisted lounger was his then girlfriend and that the bicyclists had just happened by. All of them were stunned by the disaster.

The former girlfriend checked in next, attesting that she was a third generation New Yorker who loved every inch of the five boroughs. Chris Schiavo was, in addition, a professional photographer who claimed she would never shoot a subject without permission and an explanation of her intentions! In addition, both her parents were architects who had spent their lifetimes making New York more attractive and lovable. Indeed, her mother actually assisted Minoru Yamasaki in building the World Trade Center. Rich, it appears, was really off target with his sloppy moralizing over the photo.

Then Thomas Hoepker, the Magnum photographer from Munich who took the shot checked in. He described how he tried to get from his digs on the Upper West Side to Ground Zero, but was blocked by traffic jams on Second Avenue. So he took a chance on the Queensborough Bridge and then hugged the shore of the East River looking for images to document this horrific event, all the time hearing radio reports of the disaster.

When he got to the Waterfront Five in Brooklyn, he shot but three frames and quickly moved on to get closer to Ground Zero. When he got back to the Magnum office, it was so flooded with images they decided on the spot to publish as a book. But the photo we are discussing was put in Box B, not making the cut.

Back in Munich, Hoepker was preparing a 50 year retrospective of his own photographic career when he quibbled over the photo in question, as perhaps being a “devious lie of a snapshot” as “strange and surreal” and “fuzzy and ambiguous” as it was. A Magnum colleague, David Friend, was making the book, "Watching The World Change” (2006) and included this questionable shot in a half page version. Fifteen German newspapers ran the shot. (Only one U.S. paper did.) But at an exhibition in Munich about his career, he was constantly asked by the visitors he accompanied to explain the WTC shot in more detail. He couldn’t!

The show stumbles on. SLATE urges the other unidentified bikers to email their own bloggery versions. Rich has been asked to join the Fray with a rejoinder, but he hasn’t yet replied.

And so on. The metaphysics of our mass culture is not the sandbox we too often assume. A photo is not necessarily worth more than a thousand words. Indeed, it may take more than a thousand words to determine just what it means.

SLATE, in its mastery of our emerging visual culture, shows us how to ask questions and gives anyone willing to think out loud a chance to join the conversation. Parallel to the New Museology SLATE has been pioneering is a framework for comprehending the simple complexities of our multimedia universe.