Brian Coe and the Snapshot Photograph book
Toronto. Our friends across the lake in Rochester have started their fall series of speakers too. Marian Early, Treasurer of TPHS in Rochester sent me an email announcing their first monthly speaker, Joe Struble of GEH. Joe will speak on the ubiquitous snapshot photograph. His talk is announced as:
“Snapshot… In 1860, the eminent British scientist Sir John Herschel adapted a hunting term for shooting from the hip without taking careful aim to the possibility of someday being able to take a photograph in 1/10 of a second.
“More than 100 years later, the photographer Steven Halpern wrote, “The family albums of my great-grandparents are filled with serious and severe people looking as if they were bringing their souls to judgement. The snapshots in the albums of my parents show Mom and Dad throwing snowballs at each other in the storm of 1947.
“Joe R. Struble was Collections Manager of the Photography Collection at George Eastman House / International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester NY. He retired in April 2015 after 26 years there.”
——————————————
Every family – including mine – seems to have an album full of snapshots. These casual photos are becoming historic treasures documenting the day to day scenes and events so important to our families. In May of 1979 I bought the above large soft cover book to read about the snapshot. It was one of a trilogy of books from Brian Coe of Kodak, England. The other two are “The Birth of Photography” and “Colour Photography” which I used as primary references for my presentations years back. (I teamed up with Don Douglas who presented cameras while I spoke on processes.)
Two years earlier I bought a soft cover book by Aperture, also called “The Snap-Shot” with the hyphen. Aperture chose to use photos and essays by well known American photographers for the vast majority of its book, first released in 1974.
