The art of snapshots, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the New Yorker, among the homely staples of twentieth-century life that have been unceremoniously retired by the microchip revolution—the typewriter, the pressed-wax record, the card catalogue—the camera loaded with film has met a swift and stealthy end.

Digital cameras look much like their analog predecessors, but the viewfinder is different—a tiny TV screen, held at arm’s length—and we don’t have to wait for the mistakes to come back from the drugstore before discarding them. We didn’t, in fact, often discard silver-based snapshots, but kept them, with their negatives, in boxes and drawers to await a definitive culling that rarely came. They began to slide into obsolescence before the turn of this century, and had already become “collectibles,” with a fellowship of collectors and dealers feeding on the shoals of these silverfish as they raggedly rose from the depths of the private realm to surface in the marketplace. One prominent collector, Robert E. Jackson, of Seattle, struck up a relationship with the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, that has resulted in his donation of a hundred and thirty-eight snapshots to the institution and an exhibition, titled “The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978.” The exhibition, which runs through the end of the year, includes two hundred and fifty-four items, all from Jackson’s gift or his collection, and is commemorated with a two-hundred-and-ninety-four-page catalogue of the same name (National Gallery of Art in association with Princeton; $55).

The volume defies easy handling—it is heavier than one expects, and wordier—and an easy aesthetic response. The brief foreword, by the National Gallery’s director, Earl A. Powell III, poses the critical problem nicely:

In the years since 1888, when George Eastman and others made it possible for anyone to make a photograph, billions of snapshots have been made in this country alone. Most of them poignantly remind their makers of a person, place, or event with special meaning or importance to their lives.

My own shoeboxes of curling, yellowing snapshots derive their fascination almost entirely from my personal connections with the depicted matter—grandparents and parents, cousins and schoolmates, houses I once lived in, vistas and furniture lifted from my private temps perdu. The fascination extends to snapshots of my father in his First World War soldier’s uniform and my mother in her college hockey outfit, youthful and hopeful in the void before I was born, but thins with snapshots they saved of people I never knew, and reaches the vanishing point in stiff studio portraits, not snapshots at all, of ancestors to whom no narrative has been attached. A little halo of photographic illumination, in other words, accompanies us in our traversal of the decades, and any aesthetic or sociological values that the photographs possess are incidental. With a poignancy peculiar to photographic images, the past is captured while its obliteration is strongly implied. Susan Sontag wrote in the first of the brilliant essays collected in her book “On Photography” (1977):

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