Snapshot aesthetic

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The term snapshot aesthetic refers to a trend within fine art photography in the USA from around 1963 [ citation needed ]. The style typically features apparently banal everyday subject matter and off-centered framing. Subject matter is often presented without apparent link from image-to-image and relying instead on juxtaposition and disjunction between individual photographs.

Visual art of the United States

Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.

Details

The originator of this aesthetic was Robert Frank, with his book of photographs, The Americans , published in 1958. [1]

Robert Frank is a Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ . . . ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

<i>The Americans</i> (photography) book by Robert Frank

The Americans is a photographic book by Robert Frank which was highly influential in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness. "Frank set out with his Guggenheim Grant to do something new and unconstrained by commercial diktats" and made "a now classic photography book in the iconoclastic spirit of the Beats".

The snapshot tendency was promoted by John Szarkowski, who was head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, and it became especially fashionable from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s[ citation needed ]. Notable practitioners include Garry Winogrand, [2] Nan Goldin, [3] [4] Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr, William Eggleston, and Terry Richardson. In contrast with photographers like W. Eugene Smith and Gordon Parks, these photographers aimed "not to reform life, but to know it." [5] Frank has said "I was tired of romanticism, [ . . . ] I wanted to present what I saw, pure and simple." [6] Szarkowski brought to prominence the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in his influential exhibition “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967, [2] in which he identified a new trend in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and had subject matter that seemed strikingly ordinary. [2] Winogrand has said "When I'm photographing, I see life, [ . . . ] That's what I deal with. I don't have pictures in my head… I don't worry about how the picture is going to look. I let that take care of itself… It's not about making a nice picture. That anyone can do." [7]

John Szarkowski American curator

Thaddeus John Szarkowski was a photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Museum of Modern Art Art museum in New York, N.Y.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Garry Winogrand American photographer

Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer from the Bronx, New York, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Though he photographed in Los Angeles and elsewhere, Winogrand was essentially a New York photographer.

Later photographers such as Daidō Moriyama, Hiromix, Ryan McGinley, Miko Lim, and Arnis Balcus gained international recognition thanks to the snapshot aesthetic. From the early 1990s 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 [4] ).

Daidō Moriyama Japanese photographer

Daidō Moriyama is a Japanese photographer noted for his images depicting the breakdown of traditional values in post-war Japan.

Hiromi Toshikawa, better known as Hiromix, is a Japanese photographer and artist.

Ryan McGinley is an American photographer living in New York City. McGinley began making photographs in 1998. In 2003, at the age of 25, he was one of the youngest artists to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was also named Photographer of the Year in 2003 by American Photo Magazine. In 2007, McGinley was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography. In 2009, he was honored at The Young Collectors Council's Artists Ball at the Guggenheim Museum. A 2014 GQ article declared McGinley, "the most important photographer in America."

The term arose from the fascination of artists with the 'classic' black-and-white vernacular snapshot, the characteristics of which were: 1) they were made with a hand-held camera on which the viewfinder could not easily 'see' the edges of the frame,[ citation needed ] unlike modern cheap digital cameras with electronic viewfinder, 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.

Vernacular photography creation of photographs that take everyday life and common things as subjects

Vernacular photography is the creation of photographs that take everyday life and common things as subjects.

Hand-held camera

Hand-held camera or hand-held shooting is a filmmaking and video production technique in which a camera is held in the camera operator's hands as opposed to being mounted on a tripod or other base. Hand-held cameras are used because they are conveniently sized for travel and because they allow greater freedom of motion during filming. Newsreel camera operators frequently gathered images using a hand-held camera. Virtually all modern video cameras are small enough for hand-held use, but many professional video cameras are designed specifically for hand-held use such as for electronic news-gathering (ENG), and electronic field production (EFP).

Digital camera camera that captures photographs or video in digital format

A digital camera or digicam is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, and while there are still dedicated digital cameras, many more are now incorporated into devices ranging from mobile devices to vehicles. However, high-end, high-definition dedicated cameras are still commonly used by professionals.

An early theorist of snapshot aesthetic was the Austrian architectural critic, Joseph August Lux, who in 1908 wrote a book called Künstlerische 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. [8]

Brownie (camera)

The Brownie was a long-running popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. Introduced in 1900, it introduced the snapshot to the masses. It was a basic cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2 1/4-inch square pictures on 117 roll film. It was conceived and marketed for sales of Kodak roll films. Because of its simple controls and initial price of $1 along with the low price of Kodak roll film and processing, The Brownie camera surpassed its marketing goal.

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Rangefinder camera camera fitted with a rangefinder

A rangefinder camera is a camera fitted with a rangefinder, typically a split-image rangefinder: a range-finding focusing mechanism allowing the photographer to measure the subject distance and take photographs that are in sharp focus. Most varieties of rangefinder show two images of the same subject, one of which moves when a calibrated wheel is turned; when the two images coincide and fuse into one, the distance can be read off the wheel. Older, non-coupled rangefinder cameras display the focusing distance and require the photographer to transfer the value to the lens focus ring; cameras without built-in rangefinders could have an external rangefinder fitted into the accessory shoe. Earlier cameras of this type had separate viewfinder and rangefinder windows; later the rangefinder was incorporated into the viewfinder. More modern designs have rangefinders coupled to the focusing mechanism, so that the lens is focused correctly when the rangefinder images fuse; compare with the focusing screen in non-autofocus SLRs.

Diane Arbus American photographer and author

Diane Arbus was an American photographer. Although Arbus's most famous subjects were outsiders such as transgender people, strippers, carnival performers, nudists, dwarves, and other marginalized people, she was equally drawn to subjects as ordinary as children, mothers, couples, old people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered," Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveau riche, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, "Her memorable work, which she did, on the whole, not for hire but for herself, was all about heart—a ferocious, audacious heart. It transformed the art of photography, and it lent a fresh dignity to the forgotten and neglected people in whom she invested so much of herself."

Nan Goldin American photographer

Nancy "Nan" Goldin is an American photographer. Her work often explores LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. She lives and works in New York City, Berlin, and Paris. She is bisexual.

Street photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.

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Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs.

Snapshot (photography) photography term

A snapshot is a photograph that is "shot" spontaneously and quickly, most often without artistic or journalistic intent.

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.

Stephen Shore American photographer

Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.

Bruce Davidson (photographer) American photographer

Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer. He has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities usually hostile to outsiders.

Mario Giacomelli Italian photographer

Mario Giacomelli was a self-taught Italian photographer and photojournalist in the genre of Humanism.

Fred Herzog is a Canadian photographer. He is known for his photographs of working class people and their connections to the city around them in Vancouver, British Columbia. Herzog is one of the pioneers of artistic color photography. He achieved moderate success earlier in his career, however his first major exhibition was at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007, after which he produced a number of books.

Nathan Lyons was an American photographer, curator, and educator. He exhibited his photographs from 1956 onwards, produced books of his own and edited those of others.

Marvin Heiferman American curator

Marvin Heiferman is an American curator and writer, who originates projects about the impact of photographic images on art, visual culture, and science for museums, art galleries, publishers and corporations.

<i>The Ballad of Sexual Dependency</i>

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a 1985 slide show exhibition and 1986 artist's book publication of photographs taken between 1979 and 1986 by photographer Nan Goldin. It is an autobiographical document of a portion of New York City's No wave music and art scene, the post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heroin subculture of the Bowery neighborhood, and Goldin’s personal family and love life.

New Documents was an influential documentary photography exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski. It presented photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand and is said to have "represented a shift in emphasis" and "identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard to categorize".

References

  1. ↑ "Snapshot aesthetic". Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles . Retrieved 27 December 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 Gefter, Philip (9 July 2007). "John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81". The New York Times . Retrieved 26 December 2014.
  3. ↑ O'Hagan, Sean (20 July 2010). "Nan Goldin: 'I wanted to get high from a really early age'". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 December 2014.
  4. 1 2 Beyfus, Drusilla (26 Jun 2009). "Nan Goldin: unafraid of the dark". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 27 December 2014.
  5. ↑ O'Hagan, Sean (20 July 2010). "Was John Szarkowski the most influential person in 20th-century photography?". The Guardian . Retrieved 26 December 2014.
  6. ↑ O'Hagan, Sean (7 November 2014). "Robert Frank at 90: the photographer who revealed America won't look back". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 December 2014.
  7. ↑ O'Hagan, Sean (18 April 2010). "Why street photography is facing a moment of truth". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 December 2014.
  8. ↑ Mark Jarzombek. "Joseph August Lux: Theorizing Early Amateur Photography - in Search of a "Catholic Something"," Centropa 4/1 (January 2004), 80-87.
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