"You press the button, we do the rest" - with this slogan Kodak advertised its first camera in the year 1888. The "snapshot" was born and with it the normality of capturing even the most commonplace situation on paper. Released from the context of personal biography, many amateur photographs lose this banality. Often "art" happens without any conscious action - for example, in the form of a double exposure or curious details which have crept into the picture. The photo reporter Christian R. Skein has collected and thematically categorized thousands of these treasures in his "Snapshot Archive" and thus opened up a new way of looking at a whole century of photographic history. The MAK devotes a special show to this unusual collection and thus documents the importance of this genre in photography.

After its presentation in the MAK, the exhibition will be shown in the Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Cologne and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

Exhibition Christian Skrein
Project management  Rüdiger Andorfer

Catalogue Snapshots. The Eye of the Century Edited by Christian Skrein, with contributions by Carl Aigner, Frits Giersberg, Peter Noever and Christian Skrein, German/English, 560 pp., 503 illus., Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, EUR 36 MAK Design Shop