of an era—even the end of history: «[Mass culture] was no longer able to locate itself in the noble black-and-white photograph by the prophetic artist, but more likely in the blurred snapshot taken by an anonymous camera. The world of this consumerist pop is egalitarian, garish, coarsegrained. Cartier-Bresson’s world abounds with shadows and gestures; there is something monumental, human, historical about it.» [5] In view of picture messaging and imaging, Seibt’s traditionalist comparisons—history versus mass culture, an abundance of shadows versus consumerist pop, black-andwhite versus full of color, prophetic artist versus the anonymity of the camera— may have an associative power of persuasion, but they are nevertheless still irritating. For there are good reasons to maintain that the era of photography has always been one of mass culture, of the mechanization of consumption—or modernity. The denial of the embedding of photography in the history of media continues a specifically art-photographic attitude that since the late nineteenth century has not ceased to aestheticize photography: Like other Anglo-American critics who have intervened in this discourse, the art

historian Abigail Solomon- Godeau describes the criteria for regarding photography as art as follows: «For the art photographer, the issues and intentions remained those traditionally associated with the aestheticizing use and forms of the medium: the primacy of formal organization and values, the autonomy of the photographic image, the subjectivization of vision, the fetishizing of print quality, and the unquestioned assumption of photographic authorship.» [6] Indeed, the private snapshot is diametrically opposed to this aesthetic program. Unlike in Cartier-Bresson’s «decisive moment,» [7] the snapshot does not condense meaningful constellations into a single, ‹still› image. Rather it is bound to the moment without any regard for decisiveness. The snapshot has nothing to say about history and the events, great men and chronologies by which it is influenced. It only has something to say about immediate surroundings, about friends and relatives, about festivities and outings.

Nevertheless, it is not implausible to short-circuit photography and history (even if the proclamation of an end itself proceeds historiographically). Siegfried