ABSTRACT
For most of the nineteenth century photographers had worked with extended time exposures that required forethought and the cooperation of the subject. As film sensitivity increased, newly invented shutters capable of isolating units of time in fractions of a second allowed photographers to control brief exposures. By the close of the nineteenth century, changes in artistic, philosophical, and scientific thinking about how time was measured and portrayed, along with developments in technology-based, mass-production methods, made it possible to gauge, see, and think about time in ways that were formerly unimaginable. The actualization of Herschel’s notion of the snapshot,1 along with the hand-held camera, allowed all photographers to define previously undetectable moments of life. This change enhanced the democratic nature of the hand camera by further expanding the range of vernacular subject matter, from loved ones to streetcars, that thoughtful photographers like Stieglitz began to incorporate into their visual thinking.2 The hand camera cemented the most popularly cherished concept of twentiethcentury practice: nabbing a precise instant from the flow of time. This ability to rapidly distill complicated activities would define the majority of photographic practice throughout the twentieth century.
