| Exhibition Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

Exhibition Reviews

"The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson." National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/snapshotinfo.shtm.
Temporary exhibition, Oct. 7–Dec. 31, 2007. 3,000 sq. ft. Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs; Diane Waggoner, assistant curator of photographs.
Traveling exhibition, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Tex., Feb. 16–April 27, 2008.

The Mona Lisa is not currently displayed at the National Gallery of Art. This, I knew, would be the obvious fact discovered by five young men who were entering the West Building as I was leaving, late in the afternoon on the last day of 2007. "If I'm going in, the Mona Lisa better be there!" declared one of the college-aged men.

I did not think I should be the one to tell him the bad news. Yet truth be told, I think he did know that Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece hangs in the Louvre (though the painting was exhibited at the National Gallery in 1963). His mock threat suggested reluctant compromise in joining his friends on a visit to this museum dedicated (according to its mission statement) to "preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art."

What would he and his friends have thought as they encountered five small galleries on the ground floor of the museum's marbled West Building devoted to snapshots taken by mostly anonymous, in all probability amateur or perhaps failed, photographers? Though what constitutes a work of art is presumed, not stated, in the National Gallery's mission statement, the museum's collecting practices have historically favored intentionality, originality, and genius confirmed by time, taste, and the predilections of the private collectors who have donated works since the museum was created in 1937. "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson," curated by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, is thus at first glance a significant departure for this venerable institution.

Or perhaps not. With the rise of digital media and the decline of commercially produced, silver-based photography supplies, the snapshot is rapidly becoming a historical artifact unmoored from its original meaning and role as leisure pursuit, personal memento, or family narrative. In addition, art and its history are undergoing a transformation: the discipline's emphasis on the masterpiece and its maker is being challenged. Since the mid-1990s, the emerging fields of visual culture studies generally and vernacular photography in particular have countered the traditional art canon by extending analysis to what the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, both an art historian and a literary scholar, has called "the study of the social construction of visual experience" ("Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," Art Bulletin, Dec. 1995, pp. 540–41).

By its very form, the snapshot lends itself to such a study. The product of technological innovation and mass production, dependent on leisure consumption, the snapshot embraced the practices and the pace of modernity. Snapshot, originally a hunting term, referred to a shot fired quickly and without aiming. Aiming, of course, signals intent, and amateur photographers may have had good intentions but not much else. The first section of the exhibition explored the period 1888–1919, years when serious amateurs taught themselves through photography manuals and membership in camera clubs, while "kodakers" besieged innocent bystanders, pointing and shooting their box cameras from waist level, seemingly without purpose (aim?), and beguiling family members and friends into posing for portraits and participating in other, often humorous staged scenes. Depending on the particular camera, the results were either circular or small rectangular images.

Amateur photography from 1920 to 1939, presented in the second of the five chronologically defined sections, embraced machine-age aesthetics and consumer abundance. Improved viewfinders and lenses brought the camera to the eye and changed the point of view. The curators noted that what were earlier considered mistakes—blur, distortion, "accidental" cropping, shadows—were now expressive elements in the snapshot. Lit, quickly burning magnesium flash powder offered a new way to create shadow portraits and theatrical pantomimes. Kodak, for example, provided amateurs with magnesium powder in "flash sheets" as well as instructions for using the product to make these modern silhouettes. The emphasis on the silhouetted body was reflected in other snapshot images devoted to athletic pursuits. The nation's exuberance was quickly tempered by the economic depression of the 1930s. The founding of picture magazines such as Life (1936) and the images created by documentary photographers during the Great Depression endorsed Americans' snapshooting; the mundane was important.

The needs of the American expeditionary forces overseas curtailed the production of photographic materials in World War II. Soldiers, however, enjoyed more access to photography, and the third section of this exhibition (1940–1959) began with images they took. Kodacolor was introduced in 1942, but Polaroid's direct-positive black-and-white prints, available in sixty seconds, in 1948 brought yet another wonder to the amateur photographer. Snapshot photography flourished in the 1950s. New pictorial formats were embraced, including longer, thinner images that, according to the curators, encouraged viewers to apprehend images in a "narrative, filmic manner" akin to their approach to what they were seeing in the movie theater and on television. Interestingly, the emphasis on staging and stereotyping produced in popular photography a private "backstage" on which men and women appeared before the camera masked or costumed, trying on other identities and disguises. The exhibition's final section, covering 1960–1978, explored the aesthetics of color and the square format created by cartridge-loading instant cameras (the Kodak Instamatic was introduced in 1963, the Polaroid SX-70 in 1972). Yet, in this final section, the mere casualness and ubiquity of snapshots seemed to create a sense of anomie. Perhaps this is due to the sheer number of images taken, some 8.9 billion images in 1977 alone. The wonder of picture making itself, the curators noted, had been forgotten.

"The Art of the American Snapshot" incorporated Mitchell's "pictorial turn" as it adhered to what has become standard art exhibition design. Short introductory wall texts greeted the visitor in each of the five intimate galleries dedicated to the display of photographs. Given the anonymity of the photographer and, often, of the subject of the photographic image, label information was minimal: original inscriptions were transcribed, dates confirmed by photo-processing stamps, and date ranges assigned based on photographic technique and materials, styles of dress and decor, and other material evidence characteristic of a time and place. This exhibition silenced the clamor about the need for innovative, interactive, spine-tingling exhibition design to attract consumers (formerly known as the public). The curators provided well-written—indeed model—label and wall texts that not only focused on the image being viewed but often thoughtfully framed for the visitor the next image to be encountered as well. By such a subtle strategy the curators balanced new scholarly interpretations with familiar display techniques.

This straightforward approach was also reflected in the exhibition's overall design. Save for those images mounted on album pages displayed in freestanding cases, all the snapshots were matted, framed, and hung at eye level on the walls. The original narratives of the snapshot album and even the shoebox were invariably broken by the individual framing and re-collection of these specific snapshots into aesthetic genres and technological exemplars situated in chronological time. The choices made by the collector, Robert E. Jackson, also disrupted the provenance from maker's hand to gallery wall. (Jackson, a Seattle resident trained in art history who had amassed nearly nine thousand snapshots from yard sales and antique shops, sought a venue for his collection for some five years before the curator Sarah Greenough agreed to host the exhibition at the National Gallery.) These self-reflective themes went unexplored in the exhibition (but not in the catalog or in a podcast interview available at the museum's Web site). Jackson's training in art history surely informed his collecting practices, while the increasingly popular market for snapshots (evident in the number of dealers Jackson thanked in the catalog) begs the question of representativeness in this exhibition of nearly two hundred images, most from Jackson's collection.

The ambience created by the gallery's wall colors influenced visitors' experience of the show. The walls were painted a dark slate blue in the first two galleries, where primarily black-and-white photographs were displayed, and cream and beige hues in the other three galleries, in which Kodachrome, Polaroid, and other chromogenic materials brought color to the snapshots. Gallery visitors moved from a darker, distant past beyond memory, viewed almost mutely, to a brighter, convivial present, in which they engaged in "borrowing" the memories from the images and recalling their own experiences. On my visit, the galleries were crowded: elderly couples recalled their own picture-taking practices; several individuals appeared lost in thought as they slowly made their way through the exhibition; groups of young people giggled at the nudes and guffawed at the comedic images.

And perhaps those reactions point to the most difficult aspect of studying snapshot photography. Each image is like the anecdote with which I began this review: a short, often humorous, and typically biographical account of an incident. Anecdotes tell truths in an instant; snapshots instantly account for the incidental, but the truth of a given image remains elusive. Nevertheless, "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978," convincingly taught a new way of seeing. In spite—or perhaps because—of its traditional exhibition techniques, it made a case for the amateur as artist and the fleeting moment as history.

Shirley Teresa Wajda

Kent State University
Kent, Ohio

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.