On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

In 1971, Michael Lesy recovered a cache of snapshots from the dumpster of a photo-processing plant in San Francisco. This was, as he relates in the introduction to his book Snapshots 1971-77, a transformative experience — a “drug experience without drugs” that kicked off a five-decade career as a scholar of American photography. As hallucinations go, his trip was pretty earthbound: the images he was drawn to tended to feature people in ordinary circumstances, talking, celebrating, partying, traveling, and flirting. But Lesy recognizes that ordinary life, when you train a camera on it, becomes addictively strange.

The 193 photos selected for Snapshots — culled from thousands he collected during the period — included “intimate, domestic, close-up information that I could never have known otherwise,” Lesy writes in his introduction. His selection process positions the snapshot as the container for secrets, something only family or close friends know. And yet, he also has an eye for when something is off — something added, or missing, or unusual. An open can of beer set next to a just-so anniversary cake. A middle aged man sitting on a slouching bed in a rumpled bedroom, his entire right leg in a cast, his other leg bare except for a black sock. A woman sitting atop a piano, naked, made up, holding a cigarette in a holder, smiling impishly as if she were in a bordello roleplay. A man lazing on Washington’s National Mall, smoking a joint with the Capitol Dome in the distance.

The snapshots invite you to construct stories around them. How was that man’s leg broken, and who is this parade of people swinging by to have drinks with him? Who is that woman smiling naked for? Who is the man on the Mall looking to impress, or taunt?

Lesy has chosen moments where domesticity gets unsettled, and though no one image is particularly troubling, the pictures seem collected with the intention to make you feel wary. At that, Lesy is an expert. In 1973, he published Wisconsin Death Trip, a singular book that explored dread and death through a cache of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in the late 1800s. Paired with news reports of death, illness, and institutionalization in the area, even the most ordinary images felt morbid, vibrating on the edge of insanity. The book has a way of making you feel implicated in its parade of horrors, closer to it than you’d like because reading it forces you to acknowledge that death is coming for you, too. (It’s an atmosphere at once so seductive and disturbing that at least two novels have been directly inspired by it, Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying and Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife.)

If that book emphasized the strangeness of death, Snapshots emphasizes the weirdness of living. There’s a sweet vulnerability in its assortment of wedding-themed snapshots, where a new couple holds up their various presents — a china set, a pot — with a skeptical, uncertain glance. A couple holds a baby, presumably theirs, but their eyes are uncertain, new parents with a thousand-yard stare. People stand in front of possessions — a car, a dining-room set, a hi-fi — but their pride feels misguided, feeble. A host of men stands outside a funeral home, dressed in proper black, but slouching and rumpled and gazing in various directions, making the ceremony feel unceremonial. Two children stand next to each other in Halloween costumes — a clown, a bunny rabbit. They’re inscrutable, a little creepy, a Diane Arbus vision transported to Northern California suburbia.

But as much as these photos thrive on ambiguity, they also represent a kind of liberation. If these people weren’t doing domesticity “right,” they were also feeling more free to reject whatever “right” was. That’s a reflection of the times in which they were taken. As Matthew S. Witkovsky writes in The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978 (a companion book to the 2007 National Gallery of Art exhibition of the same name), starting in the 60s home photography became increasingly democratized, thanks to cheap Instamatic and Polaroid cameras. That freedom to play with pictures, combined with a culture that was training its gaze on everyday life in documentaries like An American Family and a countercultural attitude that had seeped into the mainstream, meant that people taking snapshots were doing so with a more ironic, questioning attitude. “These are the years when nothing is sacred yet everything is ritualized,” Witkovsky wrote, “when no one and everyone is special, and all things are made potentially interesting in pictures.”

In the context of Lesy’s book, this mainly means that people are trying to look cool, or at least interesting, but also tried to resist posing. The appeal of these images is in how broadly people accepted that mandate. They could be imitative — a man Brat Pack-ishly slouching against a car, a woman bending over in front of the Christmas tree in a skin-mag tease. Sometimes the expressions are forbidding — stone-faced expressions at family parties, bug-eyed gazes directly into the camera lens. But sometimes the interpretations are charmingly intimate. A man in a mesh shirt and denim cutoffs, bending over and holding his ankles; all manner of people (mostly men) trying on wigs; a shirtless man romping among three friends on a couch, one in sparkling gold lame pants. People showing off their guns, what they’ve hunted, what they bought for their living room. They want to assert that what they have is worth something, but we’re not sure what it is they find value in.

If the history of domestic photography moved in a sensible trajectory, Snapshots would document one step in a progression toward radical honesty. We’d have moved from long-exposure posed images, to more relaxed Brownie shots, to the more provocative images that Lesy collected, to who knows what now. But instead we’ve returned to original principals, using a host of filters to carefully curate how we look. (Even #nofilter is a certain kind of pose.) Many of the images in Snapshots, if their subjects posted them on Facebook or Instagram, would provoke head-scratching. (“You’re not looking too thrilled about that pot you got for your wedding, dear.”) Some of them might put a job or relationship in jeopardy. We’re trained to be guarded with our photos now; Snapshots is what a society looks like when it’s caught off-guard.

Maybe that’s why the strongest, most representative-feeling photos in the book are the blurry ones. A well-dressed man in black suit, thumbs tucked in his belt, arms akimbo, looking shocked or judgmental. A young man rising from his bed, clutching his head as if hungover, a DEAD END sign hung on the wall next to him. A toddler being held by the leg by somebody in a kitchen, flying upward — the skirt’s flying upward. You wonder if that hand is going to let go, where the child is going, what happens next.

[Published by Blast Books on September 17, 2021, 232 pages, $34.95 hardcover]