Visual Arts

Collection of Robert E. Jackson

With relatively inexpensive cameras in hand, Americans began exploiting their potential for fun.

FORT WORTH – The smile entered the lexicon of American amateur photography sometime around 1880. Thanks to flexible film negatives on roll holders and the near-instantaneous exposures they allowed, regular folks were freed from the stiffness of long exposures and the propriety of studio portraiture. Users in the thousands, and soon the millions, turned their cameras on friends and family to capture moments of import and frivolity that had not been possible before.

This is only one of the underlying themes of "The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978" at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. And it should be noted that the smile you sense in these 234 images is as often on the part of the photographers as it is their subjects, who can still be slightly put off or even unaware that their picture is being taken. The photographers themselves, however, are invariably having a great time recording parties and vacations, people dressing up and goofing off.

The exhibition, which has been drawn from the collection of Robert E. Jackson and organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is divided into periods covering roughly two decades each.

Advances in technology and changes in affluence and attitudes determine the divisions, but you have to go to the substantial catalog that accompanies the exhibition to see the new cameras and the advertising that promoted them and shaped their use. In the galleries, minimal wall texts set the stage, and as you follow the images themselves you see how increased mobility and ever-faster film changed where and how people aimed their cameras.

Collection of Robert E. Jackson

Portraits of family and friends, sometimes unconventional, are favorites of amateur photographers.

As soon as people got these relatively inexpensive cameras in their hands, they began exploiting their potential for fun.

Examples from the 19th century show home photographers exploring the possibilities of double exposures and collage, or drawing directly onto the finished print for humorous results.

Faster film encouraged users to capture images of speed at racetracks and out of car windows. The blurring of the image that resulted was no longer considered a flaw. It was an integral element of capturing the moment as friends tumbled down a sand dune or a motorcycle flew off a ramp. Playing with depth of field quickly established itself as the popular motif it remains today. People with giant feet have always been a hit, and examples from the 1920s and '30s show tiny women feeding giant cows and men apparently trapped inside milk bottles.

At times, the authors of the catalog do have to admit that the effects they most admire could be accidental and that the aesthetic implications they draw from them might not have been a concern for the photographer. The young father who photographed himself photographing his family in a funhouse mirror was probably not engaged in a complex investigation of the role of subjectivity in image making. He wanted to record a funny moment.

But there is plenty of evidence that as the century progressed, snap shooters were responding to the trends in modern art they would have seen at museums or in the many magazines devoted to both amateur and fine-art photography. In the 1930s, a young woman grouped herself and two friends so close to the camera they became a soft-focus blur and wrote on the back of the print, "The Modernistic point of view shows me in the center. Good?" And perhaps whoever took the extreme overhead shots of people on the street below had seen reproductions of work by Alexander Rodchenko or other modernists.

Collection of Robert E. Jackson

Advances in technology and color film are documented in the exhibit.

A few of the photographers pursued definite projects, often over a long period. A family in Alaska posed their son with his birthday cake for at least seven consecutive years. On Aug. 7, 1931, the Phi Oh Club created a series of 14 playful silhouettes that included their versions of Whistler's Mother, The Dying Gaul, couples dancing and a murder scene.

The most compelling group of images comes from a young woman known only as Flo. She lived in the Milwaukee YWCA in the 1950s and relentlessly snapped photos of her often-unwilling housemates. They walk away from her, cover their faces and sometimes sleep as she pursues them apparently over a period of several years. Toward the end of her "career," Flo is using color film that was made widely available in the mid-'50s. Flo's oeuvre highlights the voyeuristic and intrusive elements of the snapshot that is an undercurrent throughout the exhibition.

Color film and the Polaroid camera are the two final technological developments recorded by the exhibition. For the last two decades represented here, photographers had learned to point their cameras just about anywhere to find an interesting composition, and the crossovers with fine-art photography begin to flow in reverse, as what could be called the snapshot aesthetic informs art as much as art informs the snapshot.

Collection of Robert E. Jackson

The prevalence of cameras helped photographers capture scenes of American life.

According to the catalog, 8.9 billion snapshots were taken in 1979. Three decades later, that number sounds like a drop in the bucket. The home page of the Website Flickr states that close to 3,000 images are added by users every minute. We can all now make pristine digital images, manipulate them how we want with imaging software and send them to friends or the world from our home computers.

"The Art of the American Snapshot" commemorates a specific period that is quickly taking on the aura of history. But the same spirit of playful experiment and the desire for capturing the moment exists today on sites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook.

Charles Dee Mitchell is a Dallas freelance writer.

Plan your life

"The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978" continues through April 27 at the Amon Carter Museum, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Free. 817-738-1933, www.cartermuseum.org.