Snapshot has a special meaning in contemporary photography. In the 1960s, a new perspective on the ontological characteristics of photography began to appear in a series of photo exhibitions. In this trend, the contemporary meaning of snapshot also began to take shape in the discourse of photo exhibition. “Toward a Social Landscape” by Nathan Lyons was a representative example of a snapshot discourse. Lyons put the meaning of photographic representation in the semantic dynamics of photography with its singular visuality and social environment. He saw snapshot pointing to the perception and thought of the photographer toward the invisible reality. And Lyons considered the snapshot as ‘a authentic picture form,’ the conscious/unconscious awareness of the photographer about society. Above all, his concept of snapshot was consistent with the concept that a photographer captures a photograph as the image of consciousness from his/her perception toward the external world(society). In this system, photographic images always exist in the open semantics.