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As If

A crash course on the origins and importance of the snapshot aesthetic

by Urbantsok Tímea

The snapshot aesthetic – an imperfect, uncomposed, and spontaneous visual language in photography, typically associated with amateur imagemakers – has been adopted across various fields, from contemporary art photography to commercial advertising campaigns. Emerging from vernacular photography, often found in family albums, the snapshot aesthetic has initiated a whole institutionalized art canon, opening new ways of perceiving mainstream image-making.


A snapshot refers to an unposed, uncomposed picture that lacks composition or technical perfection, usually taken spontaneously. It results in an “informal” photograph capturing a brief moment of an undisturbed subject, whether a person or an object. The artistic or commercial use of snapshot photography continues the experience of these Dutch-angled, offhand images, but in these contexts, it is more of an imitation. Photographers in these different fields are not spontaneous and coincidental at all most of the time; instead, they consciously play with these (pseudo-)qualities. Their images appear as if they were natural, point-and-shoot pictures, and this act of mimicking is what allows the vernacular visual tradition to become a standardised aesthetic.

Photographers’ deliberate use of the spontaneous reflects on humanity’s long-term planning of magic. An appropriate example for this is the concept of English landscape gardens which were most popular in 18th century romanticism but remain today, sometimes as public parks. Their idea was to invite the visitor to engage in a narrative walk, accompanied by rocks, bridges, caves and pavilions, organised eclectically from different ages and cultures. The designers constructed a bucolic illusion, as if the attractions were coincidentally present. You just walk around and ooups the Egyptians left that here. As if the attractions were real historical relics. This thought is most symbolically represented by the fake ruins in the gardens. The staged spontaneity is echoed in the strategic use of snapshot aesthetics by professional art photographers: they fake the ruins when they recycle “spoiled” photographs and by attaching aesthetic categories to elements, formally considered as “mistakes”, they state that a photograph can never be spoiled.

The American Snapshot: An Exhibition of the Folk Art of the Camera, March 11 to April 30, 1944
Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue (Source: Mullen Books)

An early, historical example of the institutionalisation of the snapshot is an exhibition from 1944 in the MOMA in New York, titled The American Snapshot, an exhibition of the folk art of the camera which displayed works of non-professional, usually unknown photographers. As the press release of the exhibition stated: “That Americans are a picture-minded people is due in no small measure to the fact that inventions and production in this country have made snapshot photography the medium of the millions. And from the millions upon millions of snapshots made by this multitude an authentic American folk art has grown in less than five decades.” There is nothing surprising in the appropriation of methods from vernacular photography or any other folk art. Many 20th century cultural tendencies worked on acknowledging the spoiled, the coincidental, amongst them Dadaism, Conceptualism or the Bad Painting movement of the ‘70s redefined and used these qualities. So the fact that the snapshot, in later decades, entered highly acknowledged photography and stepped into the museums and public collections with the acknowledgement of such artists as Nan Goldin or Wolfgang Tillmans had its institutional, cultural-historical, and art-critical precedents in the past. To give more detailed examples of these practices of the snapshot aesthetic, its appropriation and the professional interest in the vernacular, I will detail the work of known and less known artists in the following paragraphs.

Robert Frank, Detroit River Rouge Plant, 1955 - From The Americans

Firstly, American photographer Robert Frank along with his most influential contemporaries, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand revolutionised 20th century art photography in the ‘50s and the ‘60s. His work introduced a subjective, more personal documentarist approach – what history of photography considers both the continuation of, and rebel against the classical, “modernist” way of documentarist photographic tradition of the previous decades. Modernism showed social issues in a formal way through the constant searching for the deceive moment and worked from a humanist but outsider journalistic perspective – usually with outstanding visual bravado. (Just think of the pictures of Cartier-Bresson.) The photographers of the subjective documentarist movement usually were admirers of the oeuvre of the Bresson-generation (Robert Doisneau, André Kertész, Brassaï, etc.) but also started to criticise them because of its hypocritical will to offer coherence and beauty even in very problematic, complex, and multi-layered themes such as wars and poverty in the globalized post-war world. The new “subjective documentarism” wanted to break with modernist formalism and conformism and approached their subjects in a more nuanced and naturalistic manner.

Robert Frank, Parade Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955 - From The Americans

The first reviews of Robert Frank’s photobook The Americans complained about the “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness” – in a time when the snapshot still meant provocation, a raw, unfiltered aesthetic tool to show a more honest picture of the world in the tumultuous political climate of the era. Robert Frank tempted to present fragments of American city and country life, leaving his mark on generations of photographers with his book, a solitary wander through the United States in 1955-1956. As an outsider, he dared to depict the loneliness, dismay, and underlying issues of society.

Lee Friedlander, Self Portrait, 1960

The influence of the book by Robert Frank can be recognised all over American photography after the years of its publication: New Documents was a seminal documentary photography exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski who was one of the most influential and openminded curator, critic and historian of 20th century photography. The exhibition was created as an important institutional milestone for the new generation of photographers and as a way of bringing the into the mainstream, and of acknowledging them professionally. “New Documents” featured works by the aforementioned Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, and is credited with marking a pivotal shift in the photography world. 

Diane Arbus, Young Man as a Cross Dresser Female Impersonator, New York, 1966
(Source The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC)

Without delving into the detailed content of the legendary exhibition, the social attitude of one exhibited artist vividly illustrates the change that has occurred in Western photography during these years: Diane Arbus – coming from a troubled background herself – captured the life of marginalised groups, and people who “were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort.”1 Their trio already showed the emergence of a generation of photographers who no longer wanted to present and shape the world according to pre-war, somewhat naïve photographic ideas, but sought to bring to the fore the non-privileged aspects that were often invisible or hidden to the public.

Mark Cohen, Upside-Down Girl, 1974

Also from the US, Mark Cohen has been a major figure in street photography since the 1970s. He has never stopped photographing his hometown, Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania, and the surrounding area. For more than forty years, he has kept the distance of an outsider, always alert observer, without any documentary intention. On an impulse of fractions of a second, Mark Cohen gets very close to his subjects and catches them on the fly, sometimes dazzled by the artificial light of the flash. In colour and black and white, his shots taken at arm's length, mostly without aiming, capture fragments of gestures, postures and bodies.

Nan Goldin, Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC, 1991

Regarding the historical narrative of intimate artistic photography, Nan Goldin also defined the framework simply by photographing her friends, flatmates, lovers, through all her life whose stories depict wider social issues in the ‘80s-90s such as the AIDS epidemic, the queer scene of New York or the large-scale drug abuse that concerned the United States at the time. Thus, she gave voice to these communities, and not from an artistic point of view but from the love towards the subcultures and groups she is involved in. By developing a body of work overtime, she became one with the continued taking of photographs, that is also why it is hard to approach her work from an objective point of view. By criticising her work, one also inevitably makes a statement on her life.

Nick Waplington, from Living Room, 1991

This kind of provocative relationship can be recognised in the work of similarly intimacy-focused photographers: the most intriguing experience in British photographer Nick Waplington’s imagination is that the viewer is hardly able to decide to what extent his images are composed. It is obvious that we do not see completely spontaneous scenes, for example in his photobook Living Room from 1991, but it is impossible to tell how much he interacted with the subjects. This book made him rise to prominence, he captured cute and embarrassing family scenes in their home and human stereotypes that we all know very well, that is the reason why we start to generate feelings for his work at first glance. We can daily encounter these sorts of photos in the picture gallery of our friends or in family albums, thus the oeuvre of Waplington it is a reconstitution of the subtexts already present in our personal images.2 Along with his typical style and self-documentation, he works with fashion similarly to Nan Goldin. 

Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1995, from the series Ray’s a Laugh

We can perceive a clear heritage of Goldin’s and mostly Waplington’s style in the oeuvre of the younger British artist Richard Billingham. He renowned acknowledgement with his photobook titled Ray’s a Laugh from 1996 in which, contrary to Waplington, he represents his actual family in ordinary situations: his father Ray drinking home-brewed beer and falling over, Ray and Liz (mother of the photographer) fighting, his brother Jason playing computer games in their cramped and untidy council flat in the West Midlands. From this enumeration we can see that the snapshots are only sometimes performative, emotions such as boredom are also the focus. As with any act of photography involving a subject, Billingham also becomes an outsider, adopting a critical perspective by taking the photos. He understands that this is necessary to gain insight into his family and the daily reality of his life.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Room – After party, 1992

Wolfgang Tillmans from Germany is also a globally recognised figure of snapshot aesthetics. He is famous for showing his images in a non-hierarchical order, let it be in photobooks or exhibitions. He is more of a curator in the sense that it is usually him who decides or at least recommends the scenography in his shows. For Tillmans it is essential to reveal the deep ontological connection between seemingly diverging entities. He first gained his prestige by starting to photograph Berlin’s techno and queer scene in the 1990s – the intimate and vulnerable situations he photographs enables us to recognise the complicated relations not just between people but perception, visibility, and the abilities of photography on a larger scale. 

Ren Hang, Untitled, 2015

Similarly, Chinese photographer Ren Hang gained attention with his subversive, erotic pictures of naked human bodies which also put him at odds with Chinese authorities and with ill-defined legislation to censor pornographic material and penalise its distributors. He died by suicide in 2017 at the age of 29 after suffering of depression for long years. From 2007 to 2016 he was publishing his journal of depression on what he experienced. We can see a clear influence in his work from Nobuyoshi Araki who was one of the key contemporary photographers to present sexually explicit content.

Grunge-icon Kirsten Owen backstage at a Helmut Lang fashion show, photographed by Juergen Teller, 1990s

Hang also interpreted fashion photographers, such as Juergen Teller’s “flesh to make it sharp” technique but more with an artistic eye. With Teller’s series Go-sees (1999) about teenage girls, Teller made snapshot and heroin chic casual in the fashion industry. Heroin chic was a style popularised in early ‘90s fashion and characterised by pale skin, dark circles underneath the eyes, emaciated features, androgyny and stringy hair—all traits associated with abuse of heroin or other drugs. Bare studios and unglamorous, often suburban interiors started to replace exotic shooting locations or studios. This tendency prompted increased media criticism which accused the fashion world of promoting child abuse, eating disorders and drug-taking and resulted in social antipathy. This widespread hatred could accumulate due to the wide audience of the photographs: when a style appears in fashion, it appears in the streets and reaches a lot more people than institutionalised photography.

If, after all the examples, you still wonder how the snapshot could have reached such an important and popular social status, I can offer a simple conclusion: it breaks the rules of formal photography with an uncomplicated gesture that easily comes to mind. It is honest, or at least appears to be, and offers the viewer the illusion of stepping into the picture and personal memories. After (Before?) the greenwashing came the snapshot-washing: due to these characteristics, the snapshot was appropriated by marketing, a phenomenon that captures all kinds of social and artistic movements. Advertisement images strive to look personal, natural, coincidental, and intimate. Edward Bernays, the American pioneer of public relations and a nephew of Sigmund Freud, believed that advertising should target the subconscious of the audience rather than overtly recommending something. This is why today we see a large stream of advertisement on our social media platforms, visually designed as if they were the posts, stories or even messages of our friends. The snapshot, originating from vernacular photography, enters art photography, then steps into fashion photography, which in turn inspires general advertising to utilise it. This multi-level appropriation is noteworthy as it reflects the usual path of many human concepts: what comes from the masses, reflects back on the masses.


1 https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/magazine/arbus-reconsidered.html
2  Cotton, C. (2014). The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art). Thames & Hudson, London


Highlighted image: Lee Friedlander, Florida, 1963, from The Little Screens

Urbantsok Tímea is a curator and art critic.

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