Photographer unknown
Meg and Charlie
INV-2197
Photographer unknownJune 1942
Meg and Charlie
Photographer unknown →photographgelatin silver print
Date
June 1942
Medium
Gelatin silver print with applied coloring
Dimensions
14.4 × 10 cm (5 11/16 × 3 15/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Peter J. Cohen
After George Eastman introduced the handheld Kodak #1 camera in 1888, amateurs made millions of snapshots depicting friends and family, travels, and festive occasions such as weddings. Even while solidifying such thoroughly conventional behaviors, amateur photography developed a new pictorial language that privileged immediacy, spontaneity, and accident. Career photographers and art historians—but also antiques vendors and flea-market shoppers—have long recognized the value of the “snapshot aesthetic.” The rise of social media and smartphones in recent years has effectively ended the era of the snapshot as both a printed photograph and an image for a private audience.
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