snapped up

Richard Lacayo on the aforementioned exhibition The Art of the American Snapshot:

This is a show that needed to be done, not merely to trace the development of home photography from the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888, but to remind us all that the snapshot was the crucial contribution to the universal image bank from which so much of subsequent art is drawn. What it fed into in particular was the great postwar photographic revolution of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, etc., etc.

Lacayo later wishes that in some of the galleries works by some of the above artists or other well-known photographers had been mixed in, but speculates that this didn't happen because the show was created from a single private collection.  To the extent that one assumes that the collector involved doesn't have such works to lend that's probably true, but I doubt he would have had any serious objection to having some photographs from the National Gallery's collection displayed, whether next to his or in an adjoining section.  I think it's best to assume that this was a straightforward curatorial choice.

UPDATE: Those visiting from MAN should know that this post is a mere follow-up; the piling on happened back here.