If sharing is caring, we are a very invested species.  In the center of SFMOMA’s snap+share exhibit, a landslide of glossy photos, the physical manifestation of pictures uploaded on a sharing site in a single, cascade from the walls. Filling the room like high tide, Erik Kessel’s installation is what Senior Curator Clement Cheroux calls a “massification” of images. Impossible to walk through without lingering over a photo amid the peaks and valleys of images, the piece overwhelms, amuses and gives pause.

The first room of the exhibit “shares”a little history for context. 1997’s Sophie Lee Kahn’s cellphone-camera baby photo modestly hints at what is to come, though her appearance is predated by postcards and mail art, early missives that played with the idea of transmission and time. Peter Cohen’s anonymous snapshots with “me” written on each, presage selfies, which are dematerialized in the Jeff Guess coruscating constellation of pixels called Addressability. If all this feels like brain freeze, ramp it up with “Take a Photograph of Your Head Inside a Freezer” as suggested by artist David Horvitz. And at the end, as if you needed reminding, inscrutable Ceiling Cat will be watching.

The late photographer and editor of Aperture magazine, Minor White, remarked that “Photography is a language more universal than words.”  With our world both bigger and closer than ever, snap+share, opening March 30 through, August 4, 2019,  offers exuberant, amusing and wry perspectives on the Big Bang.

Check out the upcoming Summer Juxtapoz Magazine for an in-depth interview with SFMOMA’s Senior Curator of Photography Clement Cheroux.