Snapshot Chronicles is a collection of album pages opened to a range of idiosyncratic moments, captured by accidental historians. In other words, while we can assume that these early point-and-shooters were aware of their role as agents of memory, some of them may have also been experimenting with a new medium. It is the tension between the vernacular photos and the carefully crafted page layouts that makes this show a exceptional one. This could be a result of the the curators having spent time in the trenches searching out the brillaint moments or it could be because the format (the photo album) suggested wonderful irregularities in its day.

The 50 or so albums in the show are splayed out in oddly updated vitrines and are generally grouped by form or content. The recurring formal identifiers of the white line on black paper, the stylized image cropping, the careful page layout and hand-written captions create the language for the show, and refer to a romantic (or at least archetypal) standard of the format. This language occasionally tells stories through sequence, and is translated or amplified in some of the more adventurous albums. These involve collage, patterning, and time-intensive illustration (at the margins of the images) and one of my favorites, an album that uses newspaper clippings for image captions. Some of the more eccentric layouts seem radical for their day if only because the photographs, so seemingly complete and perhaps even precious in their day, have been stabbed, sliced and shaped. This tendency is echoed in the profoundly beautiful publication designed by Martin Venezky who peppers the pages with visual taxonomies - a gridded page of bicycle wheels or arms bent and extended.

Traveling down from Reed College's Cooley Gallery in Portland, the emphasis of the exhibition has been shifted slightly to highlight images from the 1906 earthquake and fire. While this is ostensibly relevant for 2006, it may have turned a mysterious collection of apparitions into the didactic overview you might expect from a library. Two of the walls in the gallery are covered with images that have been blown-up and chopped down into tiles. On one wall these image-fragments include bits of transparent hand writing and the silhouetted edge of a landscape. While beautiful, this collection of panels reads too close to point-of-purchase signage in a upscale coffee shop or design boutique. The tiles on the opposite wall show enlarged snapshots from 1906 including wrecked buildings, cobble stone streets ripped open, and houses tilted and crumpled. For Bay Area residents these images are a sublimated anxiety made visible.

http://sfpl.lib.ca.us/news/exhibitions.htm