"THE SNAPSHOT, UNDER THE INTERVENTION OF FLIES ON THE WALL"

An essay completed in January 2009 an Art History Thesis

Abstract: Following the mass-marketed introduction of the first hand-held Kodak camera to popular culture in the late 19th century—and the subsequent birth of the “amateur” aesthetic—photography became synonymous with immediacy. Significant exhibitions such as the Museum of Modern Art’s, The American Snapshot (1944), The Family of Man (1955), and New Documents (1967) featured and, in effect, canonized images created by amateurs and others using hand-held cameras. Art historians such as Geoffrey Batchen, Michel Frizot, and Mary Warner Marien have recognized problematic assumptions of an essentially “fine-art” history of photography, and have argued for an expanded canon that includes a diverse field of practices, including the “snapshot” and the “snapshot aesthetic.” As James Elkins’s recent text Photography Theory reflects, art history scholars are divided about the merits of maintaining boundaries between “high art” and vernacular practices. Through investigation of the influence of the “snapshot aesthetic” upon “fine-art” practice, the snapshot’s position within photography’s history has been secured – but on the merits of the snapshot’s aesthetic influence only.

A group of contemporary photographers, including Ryan McGinley, have begun to examine assumptions of the snapshot's immediacy and conventions of its aesthetic. McGinley’s work in particular deconstructs the conventions of the snapshot, and of the medium itself, while readjusting these codes conceptually. This paper will examine McGinley’s evaluations of the snapshot's relationship to "the real," after first providing an historical trajectory of the snapshot's relation to “fine-art” practice.