The digital era has bought an end to the use of the scrappy snapshot to critique aesthetic ideology, the traditional categories sod art and the norms of artistic professionalism.  The snapshot stood for non-artistic ordinariness and artists exhibited them without framing or manipulation and it opposed the aesthetic ideology embodied in the artisanal arts of painting and undercut   photography’s institutional aspirations to the status of painting. 

This avant-garde strategy of negating aesthetic ideology  no longer works with the general incorporation of photography into the category of art, and  large scale  digitalised cinematic photography  inside the portals whose power it once criticised. 

This large scale  photography made since the late 1980s are designed to be viewed on the walls of galleries rather than in the pages of magazines or books. They have assumed a prominent position in contemporary art, acknowledged by grand exhibitions, extensive critical writing and a clearly established  pictorial canon----  Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Delahaye, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Fischer, Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, James Welling and Berndt and Hilla Becher.

Photography matters as art as it is now part of the pictorial tradition or a single photographic regime’ embracing painting, photography and film.  Presumably  Wall's effort's  to ‘resurrect’ or ‘rehabilitate’ the ‘painting of modern life’ via a photography that emphases the artificiality and the deliberate construction and labour that are involved in the making of photographs,  leaves snapshot  photography as a technology for automatically depicting the world. 

Since the 1980s, larger photographic formats have been closely associated with the artistic recognition of photography and have been equated with a contemporary form of the painting, or ‘tableau.’ The shift in scale in art photography and the fact that photographs were ‘designed and produced or the wall’ marks a spectatorial reorientation for photography by inviting ‘a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual process of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and ‘‘consumed’’’ 

Prior to this for a half-century, oversize prints had epitomized the antithesis of art – an image designed for mass communication, as ephemeral as it was instantaneous, less the work of an author than a collective production without commercial or symbolic value of its own. Modernist art was seen as the antithesis  of the mass media, advertising, or commercial decoration. The tableau form was reconstructed from its opposite by both quoting and appropriating the techniques of advertising, commercial images, and the media.