Product Description

The impact of the humble American snapshot has been anything but humble. Any American who takes a snapshot contributes to a compelling and influential genre. Since 1888, when George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera and roll film, the snapshot has not only changed everyday American life and memory; it has also changed the history of fine art photography. The distinctive subject matter and visual vocabulary of the American snapshot--its poses, facial expressions, viewpoints, framing, and themes--influenced modernist photographers as they explored spontaneity, objectivity, and new topics and perspectives. A richly illustrated chronicle of the first century of snapshot photography in America, The Art of the American Snapshot is the first book to examine the evolution of this most common form of American photography. The book shows that among the countless snapshots taken by American amateurs, some works, through intention or accident, continue to resonate long after their intimate context and original meaning have been lost.

The catalogue of a fall 2007 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, The Art of the American Snapshot reproduces some 250 snapshots drawn from Robert Jackson's outstanding collection and from a recent gift Jackson made to the museum. Organized decade by decade, the book traces the evolution of American snapshot imagery and describes how technical, social, and cultural factors affected the look of snapshots at different periods.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237914 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Paul Richard, The Washington Post
"A distinctive human spirit, playful and American, shimmers in these pictures, but you can't tell whose it is."

Review
The prints in The Art of the American Snapshot are reproduced at their actual modest size, with lots of blazingly white space, and have taken their riddles into oblivion with their anonymous creators...The camera, that highly evolved mechanism, put into Everyman's untrained hands the chance to become, if half by accident, a death-defying artist. The collector Robert Jackson deserves the last shot; his afterword to the catalogue manages to cast a pall of reasonableness over his curious passion.
(John Updike The New Yorker )

The photos, chosen for the pleasure they give, and the text. which aims to recount photographic history, sometimes seem at odds, but the ways people took snapshots, what they took snapshots of, and how they presented themselves to the camera changed with time, and Jackson's sample is large enough to allow speculation about the nature of the changes. . . .
(Caleb Crain New York Review of Books )

Professionals who leaf through The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978 may despair as they realize that offhand efforts with a camera frequently produce more visual excitement than their studied excercises...Sarah Greenough...and her colleagues help to give meaning to the ordinary by probing, in their essays, how deeply the artless has shaped what we now consider art.
(Richard B. Woodward Wall Street Journal )

The Art of the American Snapshot celebrates the humble snapshot with a collection of anonymous images belonging to art historian Robert E. Jackson.
(Claire Holland Financial Times )

It's only in the past couple of decades that you would hear the words 'art' and 'snapshot' uttered in the same sentence, but these vernacular photos have slowly but surely edged into that realm... Demonstrating how the introduction and widespread use of the Kodak Brownie and other cheap cameras democratized photography and documented everyday American life, the book contains some 250 representative snapshots, organized chronologically, from carefully posed and composed turn-of-the-century silver print portraits to some humorous 1970s Polaroids. A substantive, definitive work.
(Linda Rosenkrantz Copley News Service )

Gazing at the images gathered here, which come from the collection of Robert E. Jackson, an art historian and businessman, I was struck by the recurrence of themes: domesticity, laughter, clowning, leisure activities. Through the decades, Americans hide their faces, cavort at the beach, take portraits of their children, and are caught unawares, asleep, or sometimes in acts of intimacy...Each photograph is personal, and yet for each era, every photograph is also in some essential way the same.
(Louis P. Masur Chronicle of Higher Education )

Regardless of how banal the incident being photographed might be, or how out of focus the resulting picture is, [the photos] were taken with a view to recording something the taker regarded as worth remembering. This is a book of those memories, and some of them are oddly touching. The result is a package of images that are moving, funny and often highly unconventional and surprisingly inventive.
(J. Victor Taboika Edmonton Journal )

While other books and exhibitions on snapshots have focused more on the pictures themselves, e.g., Douglas R. Nickel's Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, Greenough, Diane Waggoner, Sarah Kennel, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, all with the National Gallery of Art, here cover the cultural history as well as the technology that has influenced how people take pictures. A time line with pictures of the cameras, chapter endnotes, and a selected bibliography complete the work. Recommended for academic libraries as well as public libraries with a photographic interest.
(Ronald S. Russ Library Journal )

This offbeat history is beautifully illustrated with snapshot-sized reproductions, smartly edited by Sarah Greenough and fellow curators.
(American Photo )

Full of deceptive moments, tableaus, and oddities, The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978 offers probably the most comprehensive explanation of how contemporary photography came to be...This beautifully arranged book is full of delightful images that will bring a smile to your face with each turn of the page...Photography walks a unique line between old and new, high-art and commonplace; and The Art of the American Snapshot aims to bridge the gap and illustrate that, despite its evolution, photography is still about the people.
(Meghan C. Smith Afterimage )

Organized chronologically, The Art of the American Snapshot surveys four epochs of picture-taking. Relatively free of art cant, it zips along from George Eastman's early Kodak cameras, which appeared before the turn of the last century...to Polaroid's Land Camera beginning in 1948, spewing out black-and-white prints in 60 seconds...At each turn, photographic technology is shown accelerating the pace with modern North American life.
(Peter Goddard Toronto Star )

Review
This book fills a huge scholarly void. Although the snapshot is perhaps the most ubiquitous form of photography, there has been no sustained study of it, only an essay or two here and there, and rarely written from the viewpoint of photography historians. This book provides a good photo-historical approach to the snapshot--its social and cultural meanings through time, its influences on the fine arts, and its contribution to visualizing modern social relations.
(Anthony W. Lee, Northwestern University )

Customer Reviews

The Art of the American Snapshot
There has been very little written on the snapshot, particulary as it relates to the development of photovision. Sara Greenough has put together an excellent exhibit on the subject. This catalogue only goes into the 1970s. Now she has to carry the snapshot into the digital world.

A glorious exploration

Sir John F. Herschel gets credit for coining the word "snapshot" in 1860; "The possibility of taking a photograph, as it were by a snap-shot -- of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time." (He also coined "photography" itself, and was the first to apply "negative" and "positives" to photography.) Given his wide ranging interests, I'm sure he would have loved this book as much as I do.

The editors divide 1888 to 1978 into four periods. The first is discussed in Diane Waggoner's essay, "Photographic Amusements." Eastman Kodak was dominant with the Brownie: "You push the button, we do the rest (or you can do it yourself)."

Sarah Kennel covers 1920-1939 in "Quick, Casual Modern." Their PR folks peppered the roads with "Picture Ahead! Kodak as you go!" Eastman Kodak also tied the permanence of photos to family values: "Kodak began to stress use of the camera to counter the truancy of memory, particularly with regard to family stability."

Sarah Greenough's covers 1940-1959 with "Fun Under the Shade of the Mushroom Cloud." Kodak introduced Kodachrome in 1936 and Kodacolor in 1942. Snapshots were tied to social life. "Life" taught Americans pictorial journalism. Snapping pictures was "modern".

Matthew Witkovsky ends with "When the Earth Was Square." "It is the period when daily life, turned by a nation of consumers into an unending succession of narcissistic photo ops, becomes fodder for media spectacle, creating the lottery-like promise of instant but evanescent celebrity for everyone. ... These are the years when nothing is sacred yet everything is ritualized; when no one and everyone is special, and all things are made potentially interesting in pictures; and when amnesia, which thrives on prosperity, takes, hold, leaving memory to scatter and fade in billions of little prints."

The history is grand and enlightening, of course, but for me the images are key. The book is beautifully printed and bound; there is plenty of white space around each shot. You are free to flip through quickly, or stop and puzzle for lost minutes over a single image.

I have three suggestions for anyone interested in photography. First, read John Updike's wonderful review of this book free online on "The New Yorker" website.

Second, consider the words of Robert Jackson who put this collection together: as Updike writes: "his afterword to the catalogue manages to cast a pall of reasonableness over his curious passion. He coins the phrase 'a visual trophy' for a medium that 'seeks to preserve an idealized and individualized moment in time.' Attempting to explain the collector's motives, he claims, 'It is the anonymous snapshot's immediacy, inherent honesty, and unstudied freedom from external influence that are the draw. . . . The personal can therefore become impersonal.' Ah, but, then again, 'a collector can have a subjective interest in a snapshot's narrative content as a surrogate for life experiences. Thus the personal remains personal, if you will.'"

Third, buy this book.


Robert C. Ross 2008

Our love affair with the camera
I love this treasure trove of a book. Leafing through it takes me back time and time again to specific photos from family albums over the years. The book is a collaborative work that captures the essence of Americans' love affair with the camera.

The narrative divides the ninety years into four "generations" of the evolution of the snapshot: thirty years of beginnings followed by three twenty-year periods celebrating the interactions of the technical developments and the cultural idiosyncrasies of each era.

While the "plates" of photographs selected from Jackson's collection for exhibition form the book's core, the authors have introduced a sprinkling of "figures" of other photographs--and Kodak ads, in particular--to complete their histories. The Timeline of Technical Milestones at the end is nicely executed.

I've no idea how the authors would characterize the last two decades of the twentieth century, but I'm certain that the first two decades of the twentieth century belong to digital photography. I'd love to read their take on this generation of the American snapshot.