Snap+Share - SFMOMA
Courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York, and Team Gallery, Los Angeles; © Eva and Franco Mattes01The 2016 work *Ceiling Cat* by Eva and Franco Mattes features a stuffed cat poking its face through a hole in the ceiling of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It's based on a meme that began circulating online in the early 2000s featuring the warning, "Ceiling Cat is watching you."
Courtesy Eva and Franco Mattes02Various iterations of the original ceiling cat meme are also part of the *Snap+Share* exhibit.
Courtesy David Horvitz and ChertLüdde, Berlin03In 2009, David Horvitz put out a call on his Tumblr asking readers to photograph themselves sticking their heads in freezers and then to post the images online with the hashtag "241543903." The project highlights just how quickly even the most pointless images spread online.
04An 1889 postcard from a private collection depicting the Eiffel Tower, illustrated by French artist Léon-Charles Libonis and based on a photograph by Etienne and Louis-Antonin Neurdein.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase in honor of Paule Anglim; © Lynn Hershman Leeson05In the 1970s, Lynn Hershman Leeson mailed postcards advertising installations she made in New York hotel rooms with stamps featuring her face. It's a throwback to the 1880s, when people had their portraits printed on perforated sheets resembling stamps.
06On Kawara is a conceptual artist who worked in the mail art movement. He created *I Got Up* between 1968 and 1979, sending two postcards to friends each day along with the time he got up. This set of 56 cards depicting New York sights was made in 1975.
Thomas Bachler07For this 1985 work from the series *Reiseerinnerungen*, Thomas Bachler mailed pinhole cameras made out of cardboard boxes from 12 German cities to his home in Kassel. The cameras exposed during the trip, capturing traces of the path the images traveled to reach their destination.
Collection of Peter J. Cohen08For the past two decades, Peter J. Cohen has been collecting snapshots with the word "me" written on them. They show how the impulse to share one's identity through an image long predates the social media selfie.
Courtesy The Lee-Kahn Foundation; © Philippe Kahn09In 1997, Philippe Kahn snapped this photo of his daughter, Sophie Lee Kahn, and sent it to more than 2,000 people via cellphone.
Courtesy Danziger Gallery. Corinne Vionnet10For her series *Photo Opportunities*, Corinne Vionet combines thousands of snapshots taken at the same tourist sites and uploaded to social media. They show how similar travel photos are—like this 2006 image of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.
Jeff Guess11For his 2011 film *Addressability*, Jeff Guess wrote software that continually constructs and deconstructs selfies uploaded to social media—pixel by pixel.
Erik Kessels12Erik Kessels' 2011 work *24HRS in Photos* visualizes the quantity of images shared online in a single day.
Collection of Nion McEvoy; © Moyra Davey; photo: Marcus Leith, courtesy greengrassi, London13For this 2011 work, Moyra Davey photographed people writing on the New York subway, altered the images, and then sent them through the mail.
Courtesy of the artist and acb Gallery; © Endre Tót14The conceptual artist Andre Tót typed symbolic slashes onto postcards he mailed from Budapest between 1971 and 1978. For Tót, mail art was a way of critiquing the communist regime without worrying about censorship.
