Ode to the holiday snapshot

“Yes, but that is a holiday snap.” I very much want to make a case for those holiday snaps. I think our holiday snaps are the most sincere photos we as photographers can make. They are less considered, less staged and more spontaneous. Even the obligatory selfie with the family raises a smile every time you look at it and sets off a flood of memories.

The underestimated holiday snap

I think the strength of the holiday photo lies in that faintly dismissive name, “holiday snap”. As long as we keep telling ourselves that is what we are making, it lowers the pressure to perform. It does not matter whether you are a hobbyist or press the button professionally as well.

I know professional photographers who mostly photograph with their phone on holiday. Who want to walk around for a week without a camera for once. Honestly, I cannot imagine it (it has become a sort of extension of my arm by now, but each to their own, no judgement).

By calling the thing a holiday snap, the focus, for me with my camera as well, suddenly falls on recording a moment or a place. On recording a moment, a good meal or a day trip.

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Why holiday snaps have a bad name

I think it is nonsense to talk about holiday photos with words like “simple photo”, “not artistic” or “only for the album”, but I understand where it comes from. Think back to the days when film was the norm and we were very conscious of every photo we took.

Especially on holiday, because those places we did not visit often had to go in the album. As an ardent street photographer I will slip in a plea here for recording everyday moments as well. Naturally.

Today’s holiday photos are made with less attention. Twelve hundred in a day, on the phone, which dangles from a cord like a handbag and is always within reach. Off goes another photo. I understand where that bad name comes from, because a large proportion of holiday photos are made that way. By young people and young parents, who do that all year round anyway. Perhaps those are not holiday snaps at all, but “ordinary” everyday photos.

The power of spontaneity

The specific holiday snaps I mean are the deliberately taken holiday photos. I visited a flea market in Zierikzee and photographed the visitors and my family alongside them. A quick selfie at La Piazetta in Westkapelle, because that is our fixed holiday ritual.

Those photos are often taken without thinking, without extensive planning or the mood board I so often use for portrait shoots. A blob of soft ice on a cheek, a gull that stays beside our table just a little too long, waiting for leftovers.

It is exactly those photos that tell the story of my holiday. A laugh, or a hand in front of a face because my daughter has had enough of all the selfies. Those spontaneously taken photos matter more to me than the carefully considered drone shot of the crumbling pier that seems to disappear in a dead straight line into the blue-green sea. Yes, I had thought about that one. Perhaps a finer photo, but far less valuable.

Emotion over perfection

Although I think that with today’s embrace of film we have slowly gained a lot more appreciation for softness, grain and light leaks, the imperfection of the holiday snap strengthens the raw emotion it records. I think of Martin Parr’s perfectly shot photos on English beaches, flashed in. Fantastic, and certainly not holiday snaps. But then, it is the good man’s profession.

Our holiday photos have movement, softness, and the framing is beneath contempt. But that does not matter at all. More than ever, the holiday snap stands for pressing the pause button on life. Recording that one moment we do not want to forget.

The memory anchor effect

During my workshops I often talk about recording places by photographing details. I refer to photographing St Mark’s Square, and to how a photo of that whole square is often not that interesting. If you take a detail, you record that memory too.

I came across the term “memory anchor”. It comes from cognitive psychology, and it amounts to this: when something new connects logically to what you already know, you remember it more easily. That applies absolutely to holiday snaps. A photo through the transparent floor of the bridge between the Petronas Twin Towers, the town hall in Malacca just after I had proposed to my wife, a tea plant and the giant flower in the Cameron Highlands. Our trip through Malaysia in a nutshell, more than twenty years ago. But those snapshots take me back, back to the most humid country I have ever visited.

The holiday snaps connect all the pieces in between, and trigger a much larger, fuller memory, including the images never taken.

More than sun, sea and sand

In France, on the way out, my car gave up. While we waited for the recovery service, we took laughing selfies at the side of the road in our high-visibility vests. The holiday was wonderful, and although the car did not travel back to the Netherlands with us, I have warm memories of the trip. We met Hans and Ria, our campsite neighbours, and Hans drove the two hours to the garage with me to pick up a courtesy car. The waiter took a holiday snap when we had dinner with them on the beach.

Those “side of the road” photos mark a point in time with plenty of mixed feelings. I was fed up with the car, fed up with the place (two hours from our destination), fed up with everything that now had to be arranged. I enjoyed the resilience of my family, who kept their spirits up, the courtesy car, which was more luxurious than my old Renault, and Hans’s Journey CDs, because “Don’t Stop Believin’ is really only a middling song compared with the rest of what they made”. But Don’t Stop Believin’ fitted my lingering car frustrations rather better.

A whole trip in two photos, the crash barrier photo and the dinner on the beach. From two snapshots to a whole story.

From snapshot to story

The funny thing is that in photography we often talk about series or projects. Niels and I do, at any rate, in our photography podcast. A series or project consists of a number of images that together tell a story. Or make a statement. Or, in this case, form a memory.

That series, coming back to holiday snaps, also comes about spontaneously. It appears without our noticing, because the photos are connected by time, place or the leading players. I mentioned the crash barrier and the beach, and those photos have nothing to do with each other on the face of it. Yes, we are in them. But to me they tell a valuable story together.

The value of failures

In the old days, with that roll of film, I always looked forward with a certain tension to the moment the shop had my photos ready. Would they have worked? Would they not be too dark, blurred or overexposed? A number of those failed photos made it into what are now yellowing albums. Not because the photo is so fantastic (in fact most of my photos from that time are badly taken snaps) but because they are those memory anchors of my holidays.

Those photos would not even make it to Facebook now, let alone Instagram. Embarrassing, a blurred photo like that. Our phones calculate artificial depth of field and you have to make an effort to get a blurred photo. That is what we have grown used to, and that is why the camera feels frightening and far too complicated to a lot of non-photographers. It can go wrong.

But on holiday that really does not matter at all.

Digital abundance and selection

I do not know how it is for you, but I apply the same strict selection to my holiday snaps as to my professional photos. Do they fit the sequence, the story, and am I still missing something? If what I am missing was recorded by a spontaneous, badly taken phone photo, then it absolutely belongs in the row.

The danger of too many photos looms. It is digital, usually, and you can just keep shooting, afraid the next moment will be better than the current one. FOMO, but in digital recording. Perhaps that is why you come home with twelve hundred photos. I think a holiday fits on a roll of 36, at most. And yes, I too send those twelve hundred photos to my NAS at home over a slow connection “just in case” and only start selecting afterwards. Of course. Imagine.

In a time of digital abundance, selecting the right holiday snaps is a story in itself. But well worth doing.

The line between snapshot and art

In an unguarded moment I point my camera at a woman on a step. She is cleaning the windows of her house in Domburg and seems unconcerned by the streams of tourists flooding the village. In summer and long after. I point my camera and press the shutter three times, because a slow burst of three frames a second is the standard setting on my Fujifilm X100V.

The texture and colour, the Dutch scene, things that make my snap Instagram-worthy, and I post it with the place name “Domburg” that same evening. I got a DM ten minutes after posting. “You photographed my mother, it is her birthday next week and I would love to give her the photo.” Of course. Lovely. The snap became a story.

The next summer I entered the photo for a group exhibition in Paris and it was selected. The year after that it hung in Milan, and last year in the exhibition marking 800 years of Domburg, round the corner from the house I photographed.

I do not know whether the line between snapshot and art can be defined. A snapshot can become art, and I think a lot of art was once a snapshot. Often we do not know we have made art; it came about, just as spontaneously as our holiday snaps. Worse: often someone else decides whether it is art. So perhaps we should not go looking for it at all. Another advantage of the holiday snap.

Holiday snaps in the age of social media

Important in this story is the pressure to share fine photos. That can undermine the charm of the real snap, because we start thinking even about our snaps. Cheers, with champagne or wine, is something I saw plenty of in my timeline. Wait, the photo has to be made just before the toast, in a re-enacted movement. The glasses clearly visible, and you take that photo, you have just had your nails done. That looks best on Insta, Snap or whatever all those other abbreviated social media are called.

But is that actually true? Perhaps we collectively make better photos, because we make so many and because social media almost forces us to think about our images. Of course that does not apply to everyone, because there is a group that holds so authentically to not doing what the norm is that other kinds of photos do come past. Often without much reach, or only among other photographers, because the crowd simply wants to see a fine photo.

I am for keeping the balance. Your social media reach and the chasing of likes should never be the end goal of your photo, and certainly not of your holiday snap. That end goal is fundamentally about recording the moment, making the memory anchor and, above all, a welcome addition to the album you will still leaf through with so much pleasure after your holiday and in ten years’ time.

That social media raises the bar a little, certainly for young people who are aware of their surroundings, and makes your holiday snap that bit better without losing spontaneity, is perhaps something we should simply welcome. Learn young, and all that.

Keep shooting, keep experiencing

Whether it is a crooked selfie, a blurred photo at the side of the road or that unexpected moment with a stranger on a terrace, holiday snaps are the anchors of our memory. They take us back not only to what we saw, but above all to what we felt. The smell of sun cream, the sound of gulls, the laughter of your family in that one little square. They are photos that do not strive for perfection but for realness.

It is exactly those raw, unfiltered moments that make holiday snaps so valuable. They are not made for likes, exhibitions or a perfect feed, but for yourself, for the stories you want to tell again later. And yes, sometimes they turn out afterwards to be beautiful or meaningful to other people as well.

So set that pressure aside. Let technique and composition be secondary for a moment. Make photos because you want to hold on to now, not because they have to impress later. Keep photographing, keep collecting, keep experiencing. Because in ten or twenty years it is precisely these photos that will take you effortlessly back to that one moment, that one day, that one feeling. And believe me: no perfectly planned photo can match that.

That is the magic of the holiday snap.

This article first appeared on Photofacts.nl (the biggest photography platform in the Netherlands), for which I have written a monthly column since 2025.