In contemporary art photography the current use of the snapshot's pictorial style  is not simply a return to the anti-aesthetic informality of Conceptual art. This is because the boundaries between professional artist, occasional artist, and non-artist have been perceived to have been eroded in the 1990s. This has created an elision between “advanced aesthetics” and the aesthetics of the photographic amateur, and concomitantly a blurring between the “good photograph”  (the result of extensive labor and post processing ) and the would-be “bad photograph” (the instantaneous photograph taken as a private love-token or momento mori). 

The current digital transformations, from photography’s unprecedented proliferation to its new means of circulation and display through social networking sites  has reinforced  two ideas at the heart of contemporary  hipster snapshot culture:  the romantic  notion of the “amateur” photographer as a reflexive artist-in-waiting and some  notion of mass cultural democracy in popular photographic practice associated with families and friendships. 

What were once private snaps have become integrated into personal narratives that are publicly viewed as they circulate through the internet.

 The traditional emphasis on the image  has been displaced by the photography's convergence with the technologies of the internet,  smart phones and connectivity.  Photography has become a way of connecting people with other people and their surroundings. Snapshot photographs  are increasingly having short-lived ephemeral lives because they are deleted or  are filed away on overcrowded hard drives of personal computers. 

In this contemporary  visual culture photography is no longer a uniform practice with a fixed cultural meaning. It is characterised by the diversity of its practices.