Abstract: -
"This dissertation, Intimate Exposures: The Private and Public Lives of Snapshot Photography, explores the development of snapshot photography as a public, political, and aesthetic form of visual expression in American culture from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Within the private sphere, the snapshot embodies both familial intimacy and allegiance to culturally pervasive ideals of "family values" and the American Dream. Yet once this genre enters a public sphere of consumption, the same familiar and banal images take on a host of new and often contradictory meanings. Examining instances where snapshot photography is made public through the rhetoric of mass culture and art, I explore the tensions between the conventions of the genre and the conditions of its publicness. Finally, I argue that the snapshot constitutes both a form of cultural hegemony and a force for change by making the private, public and the personal, political."
"Part I of the dissertation addresses the technology and traditions of snapshot photography in contemporary America and the way its conventions have entered the rhetoric of the mass media. Taking examples from popular film, television, and print
media, I argue that mass culture constructs a regulatory vision of snapshot photography that is normative, ubiquitous, and above all, naturalized."
"In Part II, I explore the public exhibition of the snapshot as a form of found art in the museum setting. While certain
collectors use vintage snapshots to create and affirm alternative histories, it is the aesthetic rhetoric of modernist formalism that, for the most part, frames the image in the most prominent of public settings: the museum. In Part III, I conclude by exploring the work of two artists, Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin, who attempt to circumvent the public/private divide by creating a hybrid art form, a photographic "snapshot aesthetic" that fuses the artists' private, notably countercultural experience with the public spheres of art and mass culture. Through the intermingling of affect and aesthetics, high art and vernacular tradition, these artists point to the progressive and political possibilities of the everyday visual form of the snapshot.".