Snapshot Aesthetic

About

The snapshot arrived with Kodak's roll-film camera of 1888 and the cheap Brownie of 1900, which put photography in the hands of families who framed loosely and shot fast. Their albums are full of tilted horizons, cropped heads and the photographer's own shadow. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, given a camera as a boy, caught his family leaping and racing in the early 1900s with the same freshness.

Later photographers made those accidents a style. Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) brought grainy, off-kilter framing to documentary work, and William Eggleston photographed everyday Memphis in saturated colour. Larry Clark's Tulsa (1971) recorded his friends' lives from the inside, and in the 1990s Wolfgang Tillmans carried a diaristic, flash-lit intimacy into magazines and exhibitions. Look for direct flash, motion blur, unguarded moments and compositions that seem found rather than arranged, even when they were carefully chosen.