By María DeGuzmánFrom María Amparo Ruiz de Burton in her 1872 novel, Who Would Have Thought It?, and her 1885 novel, The Squatter and the Don, to Melinda Palacio in her 2011 novel Ocotillo Dreams, Latina/o writers have long been critiquing the loss and even “killing” of their culture(s).
Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes's short story “Snapshots” from the 1995 collection, The Moths and Other Stories, does this in an exponential and trans-media way, employing dilemmas involving photography as well as narrative “snap-shooting” to show the effects of an insidious culturacide on the story's first person narrator and main protagonist Olga Ruiz. A middle aged housewife, Olga’s marriage has fallen apart and her daughter has grown up, leaving her deeply depressed and with a “fatal” addiction to her family's photo albums, her photographs that supposedly caught pieces of “all that time” she realizes “is lost now” (“Snapshots,” 100).
The causes of the culturacide of Olga Ruiz's culture are implied through the contradictions involving photography commonly employed to capture events of one's life one wishes to possess or repossess later. Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Christian Metz, Jay Prosser, and many other analysts of the social uses of photography have pointed out that Western societies have tended to use photography to capture, possess, and retain the fleetingness of life and living itself.
These same critics, especially Sontag in her On Photography and Barthes in his Camera Lucida, associate this attempt to “fix” the volatile and that which necessarily changes with various kinds of death (from the memorializing to the murderous) and, of course, with objectification and reification that result in a distortion of reality at the same time that photographs purport to faithfully reflect reality via the camera’s mirror or offer a seemingly transparent window onto reality through the camera’s lens and within the four borders of the printed photograph.
Viramontes’s story associates snapshots with death and "ghosts" (101) and, furthermore, along the lines of indigenous beliefs, with the stealing of souls. All of this sounds gruesome and macabre, but the irony is that this death and usurpation take place in relation to one of the main societal deployments of photography: idealization, conventionalizing idealization at that. As Sontag writes, “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it [experience]—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir” (On Photography, 9). Photographs reducing the infinitely complex “real” to the photogenic (what looks good) and to a souvenir of experience (as with snapshots that fill family albums and travel albums) are then held up against reality to push and pull that reality toward some pre-existing image repertoire that constitutes a certain ideology—or imagined relation to that reality.
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| Helena María Viramontes |
Viramontes’s story “Snapshots” suggests that death and the stealing and haunting of souls are specifically connected to how still photo images (with magazines such as Life)and moving photo-based images (with TV) have reinforced a hegemonic Anglo-American pre-feminist ideal of the "good" housewife and mother and of “woman” more generally. These idealizing magazine and television photographs have branded a picture, “a perfect snapshot” (101), or even a series of perfect snapshots into Olga’s mind. The story provides a narrative description of the perfect pictures that are essentially photo-based renderings of a hegemonic Anglo-American pre-feminist ideal of the “good” housewife’s and mother’s proper role and appearance:
His wife in the kitchen wearing a freshly ironed apron, stirring a pot of soup, whistling a whistle-while-you-work-tune, and preparing frosting for some cupcakes so that when he drove home from work, tired and sweaty, he would enter his castle to find his cherub baby in a pink day suit with newly starched ribbons crawling to him and his wife looking at him with pleasing eyes and offering him a cupcake. (100)
This scene that the story so deftly conjures, effectively creating a verbal photograph that encodes the hegemonic ideal for us to imagine and “see” in our own minds, is composed of details that underscore the capitalist values of newness (note the use of the words “freshly” and “newly”), surplus (frosting for cupcakes, additional energy to whistle a tune while laboring, a baby that looks like a cherub and not a starved orphan, and the luxury of dessert, a cupcake, even before dinner), and property (a house that functions not as a mere dwelling but as a mansion or a “castle” signifying ownership and ownership associated with wealth and privilege).
Furthermore, those capitalist values have distinct national, cultural, and ethnic valences as manifested in the scene described. The foodstuff being prepared is cupcakes, a typical Anglo-American sweet, not Mexican or from a Latin American country. According to food historians, the cupcake originated in the late 18th century United States and evolved in many recipes during the 19th century (http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring07/ayers/history.html). The predominant color evoked in the scene is pink — a light color associated with women, infants, and notions of purity and innocence, especially in the United States.
One need only remember films such as the 1957 American musical film Funny Facedirected by Stanley Donen with its repeating tune and phrase “Think Pink”). In U.S. mainstream representations this “pink” purity and innocence of dress is usually worn upon a white body. In the passage from the short story, the phrase “pink day suit with newly starched ribbons” has the effect of associating pink with white through the invocation of “starch” (usually white).
The first person narrative reveals that Olga Ruiz has internalized these photo-based images and that they have colonized her through her own desire for them. Not only do the idealizing and conventionalizing photographs from magazines and television colonize her, but also so does her "fatal" nostalgia for her family's photo albums, the product, in part, of the neocolonial colonization of a Mexican working class family by technology from el Norte (ironically won in the patriarchal Mexican sport of the cock fight):
The first camera I ever saw belonged to my grandfather. He won it in a cock fight. Unfortunately, he didn’t know two-bits about it, but he somehow managed to load the film. Then he brought it over to our house. He saw me on the lawn. I was only five- or six-years old, but I remember the excitement of everybody coming around to get into the picture. I can see my grandfather clearly now. I can picture him handling the camera slowly, touching the knobs and buttons to find out how the camera worked while the men began milling around him expressing their limited knowledge of the invention. … Finally, he was able to manage the camera and took pictures of me standing near my mother with the wives behind us.
My grandmother was very upset. She kept pulling me out of the picture, yelling to my grandfather that he should know better, that snapshots steal the souls of the people and that she would not allow my soul to be taken. He pushed her aside and clicked the picture. (“Snapshots,” 105-06)
Here the danger of snapshots is not so much their idealizing function, as the way in which people’s expectations about them equate them with the truth of a given situation. People commonly take snapshots with the notion that a snapshot will preserve the memory of events, relationships, people, and places accurately, the way they supposedly were.
It is in connection with their purported “preservation” function that Olga, the narrator-protagonist of Viramontes’s story, turns to snapshots when she is unwell and/or depressed. She hopes to find among the snapshots something she once had. She also hopes that they will help her understand her life and how things have developed up to the present moment:
I acquired the habit [nostalgia over snapshots] after Marge was born and I had to stay in bed for months because of my varicose veins. I began flipping through my family’s photo albums … to pass the time and pain away. However, I soon became haunted by the frozen moments and the meaning of memories. Looking at the old photos, I’d get real depressed over my second-grade teacher’s smile or my father’s can of beer or the butt-naked smile of me as a young teen, because every detail, as minute as it may seem, made me feel that so much had passed unnoticed. As a result, I began to convince myself that my best years were up and that I had nothing to look forward to. I was too young and too ignorant to realize that that section of my life relied wholly on those crumbling photographs and my memory, and I probably wasted more time longing for a past that never really existed. (101)
Essentially, Olga seeks understanding and a message of guidance from the snapshots in her family photo albums. Instead, her perusal of them results in her entrance into the maze of ambiguities Sontag describes in “The Heroism of Vision” from her On Photography:
If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” as [Diane] Arbus observed. “The more it tells you the less you know.” Despite the illusion of understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces. This freezing of time—the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph—has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty. But the truths that can be rendered in a dissociated moment, however significant or decisive, have a very narrow relation to the needs of understanding. (111–12)
Olga seeks orientation, guidance, and understanding from her scrutiny of snapshots in her family albums, but the “photo albums are unraveling and stained with spills and fingerprints and are filled with crinkled faded gray snapshots of people” she “can’t remember anymore” (101). She even hopes to find inspiration from these albums full of snapshots: “I turn the pages over and over again to see if somehow, some old dream will come into my blank mind [emphasis mine]” (101–02). But, instead of a dream and a feeling of re-connection to lift her out of her post-divorce depression, she discovers more disconcerting emotional detachment.
In the wake of exposure to these snapshots, she likens her mind to “the black and white television box” that, when switched on, “warms up then flashes instant pictures, instant lives, instant people” (102). This switch on of the mind is, in fact, an emotional turning off. In Olga’s case and just as Sontag warns, “seeing through photographs …promotes emotional detachment.”
Furthermore, similarly to the still advertising photographs in the magazines and the moving ones on the television, these snapshots have the effect of heightening her dissatisfaction with her actual life as even the so-called candid snapshots are shot through, so to speak, with traces of an ideology that seeks to re-shape reality into what ought to be rather than what is. The details that Olga focuses on from the snapshots—her vulnerable, young teenage smile, her father’s macho beer can, photos of her parents in typically gendered “parental” poses—suggest that the photographs are as “scripted” as the behaviors of the people rendered in them.
Both the photographs as a social practice of preserving some things and not others and the behaviors of the people depicted in them are molded by a heterosexist, patriarchal, and, in the case of Olga’s life and that of her parents and her own children, an Anglo-American assimilationist social order. Repeated exposure to these photo-based images manages to further imprint or reinforce the mental images that give ideology its power over the mind and that result in the production of more photo-based images released into a given society and the world as a whole.
At one point during her increasing depression, Olga peers into her own kitchen to see that her daughter Marge has brought her “Chinese food getting cold in those little coffin-like containers” (103). The most potent coffin-like containers are not the boxes of Chinese food, but rather the containerizing photographs Olga has been assimilating and to which she has been desperately trying to assimilate her own life, thus furthering, unwittingly, the culturacide of her own Mexican and Mexican-American cultures.
Viramontes’s story does not simply demonize photography in relation to this process of culturacide. This would be too easy and overly simplistic as photography has many uses and effects, decolonial as well as colonial ones. Instead of mere demonization, the story offers readers a stinging alternative practice of photo-graphing or writing through and with photography at the linguistic and narrative level. The story unfolds by delivering a sequence of short, sharp verbal snapshots that may at first be overlooked because they appear so casually, without warning. The story drops a clue to its method in the opening and closing lines of its first paragraph: “It was the small things in life, I admit, that made me happy … It kills me, the small things” (99).
Small images and phrases compose verbal snapshots that detonate and explode any sense that Olga’s assimilation to hegemonic culture has made her happy: “balls of wool on the couch” (99), “balls of dust” under the bed (100), “varicose veins” (101), “vaseline jar on top of Dave’s [her husband’s] bedstand” (102) used during their passionless sex, “hands greasy from cutting the fat off some pork chops” (103), “fish heads floating around in some greenish broth” (103), and “smoking under a dull circle of light … bifocals … down to the tip of his nose” (105).
Each of these verbally conjured images is easy to “picture” in the mind. Each one clashes with the idealizing images of Anglo-American housewifery from the magazines’ still photos and television’s moving ones and disrupts the nostalgia of Olga’s relationship to her photo album snapshots that keep her in a state of suspended animation.
The last “actual” (versus strictly mental) photograph described in the story, the one of the narrator standing near her mother “with the wives behind” them, never comes out (106): “My grandfather, not knowing better, thought that all he had to do to develop the film was unroll it and expose it to the sun” (106). The grandmother, upset that the grandfather took the photo in the first place (since she believes photography steals souls), cuts a piece of Olga’s hair, Olga thinks “probably to save me from a bad omen” (106). Olga identifies with the grandmother’s act, stating, “It scares me to think that my grandmother may have been right. It scares me even more to think I don’t have a snapshot of her. If I find one, I’ll tear it up for sure” (106).
This last line demonstrates Olga’s changed relation to snapshots. By the end of the story, she views them more as curses than as preservers of memory. The alternative practice of photo-graphing or writing through and with photography in “Snapshots” has an aim similar to that of the grandmother’s cutting of Olga’s hair: to both guard against and cut through the spell of an evil enchantment, to reverse the soul-stealing capacities of photography in the media (magazines and television) and in socially over-determined family photo albums and thus to potentially create a mode of resistance against culturacide.
Works Cited:
“All About Cupcakes” website at iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring07/ayers/index.html. Last checked 29 of January 2013.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Donen, Stanley. Funny Face. Color film. Paramount Pictures, 1957.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1973. Reprint, New York: Picador, 1977.
Viramontes, Helena María. “Snapshots.” In The Moths and Other Stories. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1995.
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| María DeGuzmán |
María DeGuzmán is professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of Latina/o Studies at UNC - Chapel Hill. Author of Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire and of Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night, DeGuzmán is working on two more books, The Photographic Thought of Latina/o Cultural Critique and (with Carisa R. Showden) Conjuring Worlds: A Queer Phenomenology of the Miniature. She is also a conceptual photographer who produces photo-text work as Camera Query (http://www.cameraquery.com).