Abstract
Visual artists have always been looking for new possibilities for visual speech, new ways of seeing. Since the mid-19th century, their interest has increasingly turned to contemporary life.
It was also a requirement of Charles Baudelaire on modern painting: focusing on the present. The inspirational role in this process could have been played by photographs that by their very nature allowed to capture only the present moment, "here and now".
Around 1900, primary cumbersome photographic devices on tripods replaced handheld cameras with roll films. The users just pressed the trigger.
A new visuality of photographs has emerged, which can be called "momentka", "snapshot" or "Schnappschuss". Unattended images, largely determined by chance, froze the people in the middle of movement and brought atypical views and cutouts from the seen reality.
Simple cameras have spread among a wide range of users, as well as artists. Snashots preserved memories of family life or journey experiences, but they also potentially inspired the creative process.
The photographic collections of the painters Karel Špillar, Jan Dědina, Tavík František Šimon and the sculptor Bohumil Kafka include, among others, examples of snapshots that can be described with the terminology of visual arts and and we can look at them in terms of the direction of the photographer's point of view, the way how he frames the scene and the way in which he records the movement. In the world of visual artists, snapshot has been able to fulfill various functions.
Along with a pencil and a sketchbook it was a quick recording method. It could have been a visual dictionary with motifs from contemporary life.
It helped artists to reproduce movement. It inspired the artists to experiment with framing the scene and to violate the concervative ideas of drawing, painting or graphics.
Above all, however, the attention of artists has focused on the volatility of everyday life.