Taking snapshots seriously

The humble snap can provide as much of an insight into time, place and culture as any award-winning war photograph or epic landscape. John Wade explains how and why

- John Wade

A snapshot is a transient thing, a quick photo shot without thought for technicalities or technique. It’s a picture that seemed important at the time, though often more likely to have been here today, gone tomorrow. Snapshots are rarely works of art and were never intended to be. But inevitably, they are representative of certain times, places and people – and eventually they become slices of social history.

In 1888, inventor, businessman and entrepreneur George Eastman introduced the Kodak, the first use of that name for the world’s first roll-film camera. The sheer simplicity of its use bred a new kind of photographer, one who might never before have thought of owning a camera, but for whom the ability to take pictures without previous experience offered a new liberation. Snapshot photography was born.

In 1900 the Kodak Brownie was introduced, a name that would forever be associated with simplicity of use in countless different styles of camera for nearly a century. The following year, the No.2 version was the first camera to use 120 roll film. Thereafter, the term ‘Box Brownie’ became synonymous with any box-shaped camera, irrespective of its maker. As cameras aimed at professional and keen amateur photographers evolved in ways that would have mystified the humble snapshot photographer, so the technologies were simplified to produce a parallel evolution in snapshot models. It continued through the years with the introduction of myriad simple-to-use cameras, culminating in the highly successful Kodak Instamatic series in 1963, replaced by Pocket Instamatics in 1972 and onto the less-successful disc cameras of the 1980s.