Snapshot aesthetic

The term snapshot aesthetic refers to a trend within fine art photography in the USA from around 1963 Fact|date=June 2007. The style typically features apparently banal everyday subject matter and accentred framing. Subject matter is often presented without apparent link from image-to-image and relying instead on juxtaposition and disjunction between individual photographs. The style became especially fashionable among from the late 1970s until the mid 1980s Fact|date=June 2007. Notable practitioners include Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr, William Eggleston, Terry Richardson, and Corrine Day. In the recent years also young contemporary photographers, such as Hiromix, Ryan McGinley and Arnis Balcus have gained international recognition thanks to snapshot aesthetic. From the early nineties the style became the predominant mode in fashion photography especially within youth fashion magazines such as "The Face" - photography from this era is often associated with the so-called 'heroin chic' look (a look often seen as having been influenced particularly by Nan Goldin)

The term arose from the fascination of artists with the 'classic' black & white vernacular snapshot, the characteristics of which were: 1) they were made with a camera on which the viewfinder could not easily 'see' the edges of the frame, and so the subject had to be centred; and 2) they were made by ordinary people recording the ceremonies of their lives and the places that they lived and visited.

An early theorist of snapshot aesthetic was the Austrian architectural critic, Joseph August Lux, who in 1908 wrote a book called Künsterlische Kodakgeheimnisse (Artistic Secrets of the Kodak) in which he championed the use of Kodak cameras like the Brownie. Guided by a position that was influenced by the Catholic critique of modernity, he argued that the ease of use of the camera meant that people could photograph and document their surroundings and thus produce, what he hoped, was a type of stability in the ebb and flow of the modern world. [ Mark Jarzombek. "Joseph Agust Lux: Theorizing Early Amateur Photography - in Search of a "Catholic Something"," "Centropa" 4/1 (January 2004), 80-87.]

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