Finding the extra in the ordinary

Scrooge himself would have trouble suppressing a smile at the Getty Museum’s latest photography show. A fanfare for the common man, it arrives -- ironically, or perhaps strategically -- on the heels of “Photographers of Genius at the Getty,” the museum’s paean to the canon.

“Close to Home: An American Album” celebrates the snapshot through nearly 200 images, most taken from the 1930s to the 1960s by amateurs. Photographs of family and friends, pets, babies, and shiny new cars -- what’s not to like? Accessible and sentimental, the show is comfort food, just like Mom used to make. As a trip down memory lane, it satisfies, but it could have been much more. More provocative, more probing, more scholarly, more tightly conceived. Instead, it comes across like a snapshot itself, as the term was originally used in hunting: a hurried round, fired without careful aim.

“Snapshots” came to describe photographs when the easy means for making them reached public hands. George Eastman introduced the Kodak in 1888. A box camera, it came preloaded with enough roll film for 100 exposures. When the roll was done, customers mailed the whole camera back to the manufacturer in Rochester, N.Y., which developed and printed the pictures, returning them with the camera reloaded and ready for another round. A million and a half of the cameras were produced by the turn of the century. “To Kodak” became a verb, briefly; the advertising slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” lingers in collective memory still.

As with most society-altering inventions, the easy-to-operate camera had its dissenters. Interestingly, in light of the more recent advent of the camera phone, some worried about the Kodak’s intrusiveness into daily life and its possible erosion of privacy.

The popularity and ubiquity of cameras also led to what certain photographers felt was a downgrading of the status of photography. The camera, conceived as a powerful aesthetic weapon, had been put into too many untrained, unsophisticated hands. Spokesmen such as Alfred Stieglitz emerged to defend photography as a legitimate, expressive art form, comparable to painting and drawing. For a while there, during the Pictorialist era, it looked an awful lot like them both.

A half-century later, photographers were again motivated to respond to the snapshot, this time in emulation of its casual honesty. Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston and others on up to the present have celebrated the snapshot aesthetic and aspired to its off-the-cuff candor. In the last decade, a new valuation of the snapshot, as a true naive work of art, has occurred, formalized by a flurry of exhibitions and books on anonymous photographs and photo booth pictures.

With the “Close to Home” show, the Getty jumps on the bandwagon, content to go along for the ride and let others do the steering. The catalog, with an enjoyable essay by D.J. Waldie, is as pleasant and slight as the show. Both skim over the sociological significance of photography’s democratization, the snapshot’s relationship to the art historical phenomenon of the ready-made, and the force (and interest) of the market in this vast and deep treasure trove.

The show is divided into three parts, which only vaguely reinforce one another. The first gallery is the fuzziest conceptually, though it’s meant as a historical setup to the other two. In it, curators Weston Naef and Paul Martineau present a handful of mid-19th century portraits (thumbprint-size tintypes and hand-colored salt prints) and a selection of family pictures by such esteemed artists as Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Gertrude Kasebier and Dorothea Lange. The selection, taken from the Getty’s collection, merely affirms that making family pictures is common even among the best of photographers, but it doesn’t establish an effective bridge to the blast of informality that follows.

The real heart and soul of the show is found in that next gallery, where nearly 150 small prints hang in blocks of four or nine, arranged thematically: women with hats, men with buddies, couples, children, places, pets and so on. The dense arrangements de-emphasize the aesthetics of each individual image and underline the commonality of the practice.

Frank and Winogrand took this mode of capturing our clumsy, endearing lives and ran with it, injecting irony and social critique. These are the uninflected glimpses, filled with tenderness, humor, pride. They are not just declarative -- I was there, I own this, She loves me -- but affirming. These are the pictures that go into the albums of memories we’re eager to keep. Together in these numbers, they induce a warm flush of belonging, an upbeat, domestic version of what the famous “Family of Man” exhibition offered its audience in 1955.

Nostalgia and an aura of loss also permeate this material like the fading smell of mothballs. All of the pictures were culled from flea markets and secondhand shops by a group of collectors who’ve promised the work to the Getty. Severed from their original contexts and the immediate circle of family and friends they were intended for, the pictures become for us emblematic, bittersweet.

The final gallery contains 25 large color prints made in 1995 from Kodachrome transparencies dating from 1945 to 1965. Also by amateurs and focused on everyday life, these photographs are credited to their makers, and also to the creators (Guy Stricherz, Irene Malli and Marianne McCarthy) of a larger portfolio to which they belong. The portfolio of 92 images was printed by selecting from 100,000 transparencies gathered by a nationwide call for examples of the once-popular process. Exposed rolls of Kodacolor, the first modern color roll film, was typically developed and returned in the form of transparencies, or slides, in two-inch square cardboard mounts.

The prints, on 16-by-20-inch paper, lack the preciousness and physical authenticity of the palm-sized black-and-white snapshots, but are otherwise similarly steeped in familiarity and period-piece charm. Life doesn’t happen in these colors anymore -- baby blue, manila, Pepto Bismol pink. They’re the baby boom generation’s madeleines, evoking visceral, intimate, cherished memories of home.

One image from 1950 looks like a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell. Smack in the middle sits the Philco TV set in its heavy wood case, behind it a pink wall with florid curtains. Three generations of a family surround the set: Grandpa looking on skeptically at the blank, olive-faced screen; Dad with forehead furrowed in eager anticipation; and the young son with hands in pockets, coolly assuming the new technology as his birthright.

The photographs in this populist bauble of a show do hit close to home. They derive directly from experience, without passing through the mediating conduit of prior art. They may not transcend the ordinary, but they remind us to recognize the transcendent within the ordinary. Or as Waldie writes, “ ‘Fall in love again,’ your snapshots say, ‘with what you already have.’ ”

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‘Close to Home: An American Album’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, closed Mondays

Ends: Jan. 16

Price: Free; parking, $7

Contact: (310) 440-7300