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.