Ever since technology made photography widely accessible to most people, millions upon millions of snapshots have been taken. These photographs were not made to be hung in art galleries or museums, but rather to be pasted into albums or passed around and shared with family members and friends. Most of these images are nothing special and have no real significance except to those who were involved with either the people or events being captured on film. Every once in a while however, one of these images will transcend its intended purpose when the image is viewed by someone outside the small group for whom the image was originally meant. A collector of snapshots looks at these images through modern eyes and his own aesthetic sensibility. He imposes his own interpretations on to the images and views them as works of art. Clearly this is something for which the photographs were not originally intended.

     In this book, Thomas Walter has gathered together a collection of snapshots from different sources and taken by various amateur photographers. Ordinarily these pictures would never have appeared together, but rather they would have been displayed in a family album with other similar pictures.   In all likelihood a lot of these images were not considered to be very good, or were even thought to be mistakes by the people who took them. The photographer never intended to distort the picture by  cutting  off the heads of his subjects or blurring  the image because of some unintended motion.    He  wished to make   as clear a record as possible of some family or personal event and capture it on  film.  In some cases, such as the erotic pictures, the images  were probably meant to be very private indeed.

     Thomas Walter has put together a book of wonderful amateur images which reflect his own eye as well as his own interest in the great photographs of the 20’s and 30’s.

11/02