When prompted to explain his framing approach, American photographer Garry Winogrand once noted that “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” Best known for his “straight photography” of city streets in the 1960s and 1970s, Winogrand always exuded great pleasure in knowing that “all things are photographable.” Even though Winogrand adamantly refuted his work being tagged as snapshots, much can be taken from these rising tensions within twentieth-century vernacular photography and the motivations behind defining what is (and is not) a snapshot en route to fashioning a “snapshot aesthetic.” While now, very much a dying breed in the digital age, the snapshot – with its vintage, yellowing frame, gratifyingly amateurish mistakes and awkward poses – continues to captivate us.

The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 was published in conjunction with a recent exhibition of the same title at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which ran from 7 October through 31 December 2007. The hefty, impressive catalogue features 254 images superbly reproduced at their actual size in ample plate sections, as well as interspersed and commented on within the essays that comprise the volume and divide snapshot-taking into four generations: “Photographic Amusements, 1888–1919,” “Quick, Casual, Modern, 1920–1939,” “Fun Under the Shade of the Mushroom Cloud, 1940–1959,” and “When the Earth Was Square, 1960–1978.” All of the photographs were carefully selected by the exhibition's curators from the astounding 8,000+collection of Robert E. Jackson, an art historian from Seattle, who has spent the last ten years amassing his fortune via well-known dealers and eBay and random fleamarket finds. While the greatest lure emanates from the peculiar yet somehow familiar, often theatrical, calibre of the prints themselves, the essays offer insightful background and analysis of the rise and fall of the snapshot phenomenon, assessing shifts in its popularity, utility and subject matter alongside those in the greater American social landscape.

Following a brief foreword by National Gallery director Earl A. Powell III, and an introduction by Sarah Greenough, curator and head of its department of photographs, the first section, by assistant curator Diane Waggoner, details the first thirty years, in particular how Kodak's Brownie model, introduced in 1900 at an everyman cost of one dollar, dramatically brought American photography to more democratic horizons. The second essay, by Sarah Kennel, captures those vibrant years when the vernacular came into its own, claiming new sights and spaces formerly staked out by fine art photography. Greenough likewise pens the third essay, which traces how such innovations as colour film Kodachrome, the Polaroid (1948) and more mobile Leica 35-mms, and flashbulbs dramatically transformed the scene. The final piece, by Matthew S. Witkovsky, ends on a highly critical note, gauging the significance of the snapshot as it contended with rising consumerism and television as spectacle, the media onslaught of the 1960s and 1970s with the collision of private and public images, and the emergence of an eager generation of avant-garde photographers who took up the reins of the unglamourous and banal as their own.

While a few history books and exhibitions have previously detailed the snapshot's contribution to the medium, no volume to date quite hits all the buttons this one does. The Art of the American Snapshot not only surveys relevant historical, technical, formal and advertising developments, but more critically situates snapshot photography as a potent aesthetic and cultural force within twentieth-century American society, further exploring the increasingly blurry lines between domestic and public spheres, personal and collective memory, private and civic lives. As a whole, the catalogue candidly visualizes and engages with these dilemmas, and moreover revisits Winogrand's above-mentioned claim per Witkovsky's provocative words in the final essay: indeed if “all things are made potentially interesting in pictures,” with such intimate, immediate images cut loose from their personal narratives, does an “amnesia, which thrives on [this] prosperity, [then take] hold, leaving memory to scatter and fade into billions of little prints” (230)?