Snapshots

"You press the button, we do the rest." Kodak used this slogan in ads for the first box cameras, introduced by George Eastman in 1888. From then on, virtually anyone could take pictures--the snapshot was born! Without exception, the amateur photos presented in The Eye of the Century capture what are essentially ordinary moments--yet every trace of banality disappears once they are removed from the context of personal biography. Sometimes the moment is right, and art just "happens," in the form of double or multiple exposures, slipped horizons, or curious details that enter the picture frame because the camera moved just as the shutter was released. Christian R. Skrein-Bumballa, an artist and a former professional photographer, has tracked down and collected thousands of these treasures, which can be viewed as part of our visual heritage. His impressive selection of photographs is here arranged thematically, and at its heart we find the essentials of the human joy and pain, visualized in the decisive moment in which history stands still for a fraction of a second. Snapshots features the most aesthetically notable and otherwise curious photographs from the S.A.S. Snapshots Archiv Skrein, a collection of nearly one million snapshots from all over the world.