Vintage snapshot galleries

While collecting vintage slides or snapshots is not the most popular hobby in the world, there are certainly plenty of people who share my interest. I have spent the past few days researching some of the online snapshot galleries, and will discuss some of them in coming weeks. The one that has most interested me over the past few days is project b, which is the work of Barbara Levine, a curator, artist, and author.

Project b is a beautiful site, and I like the way Levine categorises the images according to subject matter—the "unusual and funny" category currently has a great picture entitled Woman in Gas Mask. What I like most of all, though, and what I am longing to buy, is Levine's series Finger in Your Eye. It's a collection of snapshots in which the subject is partially obscured by the finger of the person taking the photograph. As Levine writes, "because the fingertip shown in the photo is the photographer’s, we become aware viscerally of the relationship between photographer, subject and camera. We immediately wonder about the photographer and their relationship to the people or things in the picture."

In a lovely essay about snapshot collecting, Hannah Lifson writes: "Often discarded by their owners for their muddled images—in other words, their inability to describe their intended subject clearly—'mistake' photographs are accidental hymns to the unpredictability of life itself."

Project b made me think about other kinds of mistake photography, or photographs with unexpected effects. A brief search soon led me to a flickr group dedicated to collecting vintage snapshots that contain the photographer's shadow. The snapshot Two Women in Dresses with a Shadow (above), is from another group, Vintage Shadow People. It's not the finger of the photographer this time, not an actual part of his or her body that has made its way into the shot. It's a shadow, which is intimately the photographer's and yet not a possession at all.

How does this all relate to what is abandoned and lost?

I am not entirely sure. But it's making me think again that perhaps my real interest is not in things that are lost, but in things that are on the verge of being lost. Things caught between worlds. Maybe that's what the link is. I'll keep on thinking—and looking—until I work it out.