Photographic Genres
Divided not by argument but by what gets photographed and from where, with the apparatus setting the terms, be it a microscope, a telescope, an aircraft or a photo booth.
Dictionary entry
- Lomography 1992– / Style
A movement that wrote the accidents of the Soviet LC-A toy camera into a charter. Vignetting, color casts and cross-processed saturation were all affirmed under ten rules and the instruction not to think but to shoot, which made it the forerunner of post-digital love for analog.
- Spirit Photography 1862–1930s / Style
The 19th-century trade in ghosts produced by double exposure. From Mumler's portrait of Lincoln's widow to the séance boom, it fed on the very belief that a photograph proves something, a style built from media deception and desire.
- Snapshot Aesthetic 1888– / 1960s art adoption / Style
An aesthetic that takes the failures of amateur photography since Kodak, the tilted horizon, the head cut off at the edge, the flatness of the flash, and claims them on purpose. The intimacy of the family album became a grammar for art photography from Winogrand to Goldin.
- Photomicrography 1840s– / Technique
Scientific photography that records, through a microscope, structures the eye cannot reach. Bentley's snowflakes proved the scientific image could be beautiful, and that claim runs on through polarized color and fluorescence to the Nikon Small World of today.
- Purikura 1995– / Style
Japan's photo-sticker culture: doodles, mori enhancement and big-eye retouching plus tiny shareable stickers completed the grammar of edit-then-share selfies before social media existed.