What’s a Snapshot? (a discourse)

Definitions, attitudes, praxis, classification, fuzzyness, .

“A snapshot is popularly defined as a photograph that is "shot" spontaneously and quickly, most often without artistic or journalistic intent.” (Wikipedia)

• SNAP: finger click, shutter noise• SHOT: gun analogy, capture, fast, quick, short

• quick, easy, no-fuss (so easy, even women & small children can do it).

• naturally occurring ‘moment’ in time• antitheses of staged or constructed• 2-way accessible (to make and view)• unsophisticated or accessible equipment• point-and-shoot.

Snapshots are…

… gendered?

• early advertising aimed at women• with claims of ease of use & low cost• featuring domestic settings and occasions• holidays, baby, childhood pictures• for display or protection in albums (a craft in itself)

In Sept 2007, most (almost all) film developing business to a Newcastle photo shop was from women.

Eye witness research Asda Hartlepool photographic counter March 2013: all customers female, most digital memory cards or disposable film.

Snapshots are…

… most photographs?

Flickr total (March 2013): 8,651,174,683Instagram total: 40,000,000Facebook (average day): 300,000,000Facebook (New Year’s day 2013) 1,100,000,000

Geoffrey Batchen in ‘Snapshots’ (2008)

• boring pictures, predictable• conservative• repetitive in form & content• ubiquitous• familiar• cloyingly sentimental• repetitively uncreative• banal

Tom Hunter: The Guardian March 2012

On missing a great picture: ‘There are millions of pictures like this one all over the internet and they're not really saying very much apart from: "Wow, this looks funny." I've made my niche and this isn't it.’

Batchen (2008)

“Snapshots are to the history of photography as photography is to the history of art.”

A threat to hegemonic stability, to the dominant art world paradigm, to power.

Samson Kambalu’s theory of photography’s threat to mimesis in Uccello’s Vineyard.(pre-internet)

Sonja Campbell: The Snapshot Museum

Mimesis’ Response to the Challenge of Photography

Samson Kambalu speaking at #Format13 in Derby:

@NEPhotoNetwork Samson Kambalu talks eloquently about photography as the death of mimesis. #format13@NEPhotoNetwork Uccello’s Vineyard – his novel. A new doctrine of Lutheran subjectivity. Must read. #format13

@NEPhotiNetwork Jesus could have been a photographer, lots of evidence of pictures made without the human hand. Riveting concept from Kambalu #format13

Theory that photography may have been invented in the very distant past, and was hidden, banned, decried, subsumed, buried as it presented a challenge to the establishment world of art and power.

Uccello’s Vineyard:

“The book’s central conceit is that a friar called Uccello invents photography around the turn of the 16th century, and then describes the repercussions of this and the upheaval it causes.” (Amazon review)

Response/s to the Snapshot• Monetisation

– Lower the price of units of production, increase the cost of dissemination: the rentier culture of photo hosting.

– Mass production of instant cameras or prosumer cameras with instant features.

– Smartphones (Best Camera).

Muellner: “a ritual of enacting presence in the teeth of the experiential collapse demanded by incessant consumerism”

• Appropriation– Eric Kessel (of pictures); Martin Parr (of style).

• Appropriation with Aggregation (of pictures)– Thomas Sauvin’s Silvermine; Pep Ventosa.

Case Study: Martin Parr

• early work as Butlins photographer (family snaphot Filey 1964)

• snapshot aesthetics– flash or overpowering ambient– mundane or vernacular subject matter– search for ‘accidental’ moments

• Port Eliot Festival 2006 & 2011

Parr at Port Eliot 2006 / 2011

2006: LF camera, interiors, natural lighting.

Port Eliot 2011: modus operandi– roaming, working alone– small Billingham; Nikon D300; SB600 on-camera

flash– many assistants but none of them photographing– prints exhibited & immediately available for sale

Roaming photographer, working alone. Shockingly bright noisy flash-bang. Unposed. Accidental? A moment. Prints made overnight & available for sale. Butlins Filey 1963.

Pep Ventosa

“The collective snapshot series is an homage to the most enduring form of photography. Ever since Kodak put a camera within affordable reach, people have been making their own photographic record.

Images in this series blend together dozens of snapshots to create an abstraction of the places we’ve been and things we’ve seen. A celebration of our collective memory.”

Pep Ventosa

Nicholas Muellner

“Increasingly, the ritual of viewing photographs is no longer about forging a tenuous connection to the past – or even about memory.

It is, rather, an act of repeatedly reconstituting a presence that feels situated in time, resonating between a past and a future that suggests the now, while constantly deferring it.

The picture is always present, even before it is fixed. We are the ones who have come unmoored.”

Katrin Joost

At Format13 in Derby:

@NEPhotoNetwork Arguing that film gives us a link to a real moment in time. Digital is immediate access to potential picture. Joost #format13

Paper: Postmodern Photographic Process: From Mass Production of the Particular to the Digital Display of the Hyperreal.

The Kodak Moment (Urban Dictionary)• “Aww!.. They look soo happy sitting there by the lake! That's

definetly a kodak moment!

• “a rare, one time, moment that is captured by a picture, or should have been captured by a picture.”

• An event for which you or someone wished someone nearby had a camera to take a picture.

• An moment that is so beautiful, incredible or downright hilarious that it deserves to be preserved with a picture, and yet no one present has a camera with them.

Neil Montanus’ Kodak Summer Girl campaign (throughout 1960s)

Essay: Typologies of the Snapshot in Social Media

• The slow(er) shift to digital in the creation of the snapshot.

• When did photographs start to become images?

• The role & typologies of the snapshot in social media. Useful photography (Germain) vs soundbite communication images.

• Issues of archiving vs modes of communication (Flickr, Instagram vs Twitter).

Sohrab Mohebbi

“With the rapid advancements of digital technologies of documentation, the gap between taking the image and viewing it has shortened to the point that we can now experience the documentation of life in close to real time.

This phenomenon has further complicated our relationship with images produced by cameras, shifting their status from relics of the past to documents of presence, explains Sohrab Mohebbi, whose blog Presence Documents will address the effects of instant digital image-making on the contemporary perception of life.”

The Kodak ‘Girl’ (1960s)

References

• Geoffrey Batchen (set text +)• Tom Hunter: tomhunter.org• Snapshot Museum: thesnapshotmuseum.com• Nicholas Muellner: nicholasmuellner.com• Samson Kambalu: samsonkambalu.com• Martin Parr: Port Eliot magnumphotos.com• Pep Ventosa: pepventosa.com• Sohrab Mohebbi: presencedocuments.com