snapshot: Definition from Answers.com

Originally a shooting term, meaning a shot taken with little or no delay in aiming. It first acquired a photographic meaning as early as the 1850s, when the first ‘instantaneous’ exposures became possible. A writer in 1859 spoke of ‘snapping’ the camera shutter at the subject and, in 1860, Sir John Herschel first used the word ‘snapshot’ when discussing the possibility of taking a rapid sequence of instantaneous photographs to analyse motion. However, it is only since the 1880s, with the emergence of popular photography, that it has assumed its more common photographic association and popular usage. Following the introduction of cheap, easy-to-use hand cameras around the end of the 19th century, a snapshot has progressively come to mean a photograph taken by an unsophisticated amateur, using a simple camera.

Today, it is the intent of the photographer, rather than the exposure time, that best serves to define the snapshot. Whilst the majority of snapshots are taken with comparatively brief exposures, some are not. Moreover, whilst the word also implies a degree of spontaneity, many snapshots are the result of considerable preparation and arrangement of the subject. The fundamental characteristic of the snapshot is that it is a ‘naive’ document, motivated solely by a personal desire to create a photographic record of a person, place, or event and with no artistic pretensions or commercial considerations. Since snapshots are taken by people with little or no technical knowledge of photography or the rules of composition—with often predictable and unfortunate results—the word has also acquired a pejorative association. The popularization of photography was seen as a threat by those who championed the status of the medium as Art. As early as 1899 Alfred Stieglitz complained that ‘The placing in the hands of the general public a means of making pictures … has of necessity been followed by the production of millions of photographs. It is due to this fatal facility that photography as a picture-making medium has fallen into disrepute.’ Photographs considered to be without particular value or merit were dismissed as snapshots or, in the abbreviated and even more damning-sounding form of the word, as ‘snaps’.

In a shoebox at the writer's parents' home there is a postcard addressed to his grandmother, dated August 1963. From her deckchair on the beach, with one eye on her 4-year-old son's sandcastle building, his mother writes: ‘Dad gone for a walk on his own to see the camera shops (no interest to us). Thanks for sending the camera. It arrived safely. We have bought a colour film so hope it turns out OK. We should have some good ones.’ His father did indeed get ‘some good ones’, still kept in the same shoebox as the postcard—children paddling or donkey riding, their mother asleep in her deckchair—together with hundreds of other snapshots, bundled together in this and other boxes. Snaps of family and friends, pets and possessions, holidays and weddings, achievements and embarrassments. Most families have a similar hoard, hidden away in wardrobes, cupboards and drawers, boxes or old handbags. Accumulated over several generations, they are a treasured part of the domestic clutter with which we surround ourselves. Familiar, comfortable, and often predictable images, they conform to a visual language that we can all ‘read’. Together, they form a record of the complex relationships and social rituals that shape our lives. Each collection of family snapshots shares a common pattern, yet each is unique. Family snaps are an essentially private medium in which we invest all the weight of our personal experience and memory. No matter how technically poor they might be, snapshots are enriched by the many layers of meaning that we are able to bring to them. Remove this level of understanding and personal involvement and the photograph is inevitably diminished. As Hugo van Wadenoyen wrote in Wayside Snapshots (1947), ‘snaps … are nearly always dull, lifeless things. They are feeble ghosts of the occasions that have brought them forth, mildly evocative possibly to those immediately concerned in the events recorded but merely fatuous and boring to the outsider.’ Snapshots may, of course, be viewed objectively, as it were from ‘outside’. But the context then is that of social history, sociology, or the history of photography.

Snapshots are primarily personal records. Once removed from this context, their meaning inevitably changes. When the link between the snapshot and its creator or subject is severed, the ‘anonymous’ photograph is laid open to a vast range of potential readings. Lacking specific information, we rely on imagination to fill the gaps. As Doug Nickel, curator of the first major snapshot exhibition, held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998, has written, ‘we enjoy anonymous images for their strangeness, their narrative indeterminacy, for the ambiguity that frequently compels us to ask, Why was this picture taken? What is going on here? What were they thinking? The voyeuristic pleasure obtained from examining another's private documents … operates here as well, kindling voluptuous speculation and vicarious sensation.’ However, whilst diminishing its value, removing a snapshot from its contextual framework does not render it entirely worthless. The value of snapshots as historical documents has recently come to be recognized. Moreover, to the sociologist and cultural anthropologist snapshots are a potentially rich resource for study and interpretation. There is a danger of snapshots, just like other vernacular evidence of material culture, being transformed into aesthetic objects through being exhibited in galleries in a traditional art context. However, this should not preclude a considered study of the aesthetics of snapshot photography. Occasionally, of course, snapshot photographers have created images of startling power and beauty. Given the countless millions of snapshots that have been taken, however, this is hardly surprising and should be viewed as serendipity rather than design. Of greater importance is the snapshot's seeming lack of artifice and unselfconscious directness of approach. From the 1970s, some photographers, seeing a stylistic virtue in this perceived lack of sophistication, created work that was grouped under the general label of ‘the snapshot aesthetic’. Later, a similar approach may be identified in the work of photographers such as Martin Parr and Richard Billingham. A different form of ‘snapshot art’ is to be seen in the work of the German artist Joachim Schmid, who for twenty years worked with ‘found’ photographs picked up in the street, arranging them into fantastic visual archives.

The origins of popular photography can be traced back to George Eastman's introduction in 1888 of the Kodak camera, pre-loaded with film and marketed with the slogan ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’ For the first time, the act of picture taking was separated from that of picture making. The Kodak was simple enough for anyone to use. Eastman claimed: ‘We furnish anybody, man, woman or child, who has sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button … with an instrument which altogether removes from the practice of photography the necessity for exceptional facilities, or in fact any special knowledge of the art.’ As Frank Meadow Sutcliffe put it, no longer did a photographer have to be ‘an artist, chemist and mechanical engineer’ rolled into one. With the rapid introduction of cheaper camera models, culminating in Eastman's introduction of the Brownie in 1900, the economic as well as the technical constraints which had delayed the popularization of photography were lifted. For the first time, photography became accessible to millions of people. By the 1930s it was estimated that over half the households in Britain owned a camera. Today, most families have several. The proliferation of cameras has been dynamically related to advances in photographic technology, especially since the 1970s. Colour film, electronic flash, automatic exposure, focusing, and loading made it easier than ever for anyone to produce sharp, correctly exposed photographs, indoors or out. From the late 1990s, home computer ownership, cheaper cameras, and direct printing technology brought digital photography within reach of the ‘point- and-shoot’ amateur. However, whether in colour or black- and-white, silver based or digital, the subjects that people choose to photograph and the ways in which they photograph them have changed remarkably little. The syntax of the snapshot has remained consistent over generations. The ‘typical’ roll of film (or flash card) still has a Christmas tree at each end and a beach in the middle, and the birth of a child remains the prime incentive for buying a camera.

Anon. Three men in a car, 1920s

— Colin Harding

Bibliography

Green, J. (ed.), ‘The Snapshot’, Aperture, 19 (1974).
Coe, B., and Gates, P., The Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography, 1888-1939 (1977).
King, G., Say ‘Cheese’: The Snapshot as Art and Social History (1986).
Harding C., and Lewis, B., Kept in a Shoebox: The Popular Experience of Photography (1992).
Kenyon, D., Inside Amateur Photography (1992).
Starl, T., Knipser: Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980 (1995).
Nickel, D., Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present (1998).
Batchen, G. (ed.), ‘Vernacular Photographies’, History of Photography, 24 (2000).
Smith, J., ‘Roll Over: The Snapshot's Museum Afterlife’, Afterimage, 29 (2001)

		Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
		Computer Desktop Encyclopedia. THIS COPYRIGHTED DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher. © 1981-2009 Computer Language Company Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Photography Encyclopedia. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Snapshot". Read more
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