Instagram was great in the beginning. I jumped over from 500px and I enjoyed the social aspect that came with interacting with other photographers. But now that everyone with an iPhone and an Instagram account is a “photographer”, my opinions on social media have changed. I’ve had a camera since I was 10, a masters in fine art photography, and a 12 year career in commercial photography before digital ever happened. Galleries and print were the only ways to get your work out there. Now I’m getting back to that, the true feel of photography. I shoot film again, focus on my website, submitting to galleries, and printing books. I decided that instead of giving something else all my energy, I would just make my own magazine. And that’s how I ended up here. I started writing and sharing photos, and in about a month my magazine will go to print. So much more rewarding than social media. I still look through instagram occasionally. YouTube is better for inspiration and knowledge in my opinion. What social media makes you forget is that we survived long before it was ever here, and there are countless professional photographers who have great careers and don’t use social media. Now that I am focused on my own projects off social media, I don’t even have time for it anymore, it has become secondary, if even a consideration at all. Just shift your focus to your work and your ideas, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Social media is not the enemy, yet it does require the keen ability to compartmentalize our mental activities and all the other aspects that come with building and optimizing an online presence.
In the MFA grad years, there was huge pressure to find your gallery, your shows, and participate in all the churning that goes with that. I went to work in the design field instead. Finally, I am allowing my mind to wander in the creative spirit realm using the vission/mission structure as countermeasure.
Carolyn I remember that pressure. I do find the rewards of the “old ways” far outweigh the short lasting rewards of social media. It does have its place and I agree it is not always the enemy. It can be used to advantage. However, I feel that we can get lost in the cycle of beginning projects based on social media influence and not seeing those thru to maturity and depth before the next new shiny thing crosses our feed. I’m all for getting inspiration from social media when you need it, but then put it aside and use what’s inside ourselves to give out work true meaning and not just another dramatic colorful photo. Happy shooting!
Your words resonate so much! Thank you for sharing. I quoted you on this:
"What social media makes you forget is that we survived long before it was ever here, and there are countless professional photographers who have great careers and don’t use social media."
I can so relate to this. I started as an E6 processor in London in the 80s. I complement you on moving away from any social media platforms. I hope, if I can get the courage, to also start my own web site. The truth is I fear it being a ghost town so I refrain from trying. Also as it's not for a career but only as a hobby, at 67 yrs it never seems to inspire an urgency in me.
Thank you Joseph I remember using the E6 machines! Even if you’re just making a website for fun it can be rewarding to see the accomplishment. Happy shooting!
The biggest lie of IG in its current iteration is that if you consume more, you can create more. But the reality is that the more you consume, the less you create… the less you live.
For the artist, the photographer, it is taking the very foundation it needs to create and share the work. Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “We photo-reporters are people who supply information to a world in a hurry, a world weighted down with preoccupations, prone to cacophony, and full of beings with a hunger for information and needing the companionship of images.” How can we supply the world with images when the pressure to be in a hurry and create so much content catch up with anyone? Less attainable in a feed full of ads and sponsored posts that drive the viewer OUT of the app and into a checkout page. It is requiring more from the artist to pause, retract and THEN come back to the platform to engage.
It promotes disassociation and mindless scrolling because we are taking all of the noise in and overwhelming our systems without processing it.
Photography was a lifestyle. Taking photos with a camera was just the first step in a series of steps to create photos. Developing, scanning, enlarging and printing went hand in hand. There was a dedication to a handful of images and a story rather that excess.
Instagram robs me of the possibility to engage with work that moves me. I prefer to engage with the author offline and will often opt to buy their photo book and meditate in a body of work. IG will never replace a museum visit or a gallery exhibit in real life.
My opinion is that Instagram promotes extreme shallowness both in appreciating photography and in making pictures.
The good news is that you can always leave it. I deleted my account about two years ago and I’m way happier as a photographer and as a person ever since.
I'm quite ashamed of admitting it but, not only I have the bad habit of scrolling without really looking, but when I take pictures for myself and for my projects, in the back of my mind, there's always the same thought: "Is this picture going to work on Instagram? Is it going to be liked by people?".
I have serious trouble on photographing without thinking this all the time. I want to go back to a time where I take pictures only for the sake of it, not because it has to work in a social platform.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'm definitely going to read it.
I recently had a potential client who shared with me one of her favorite photographs that I had taken— and it was a snapshot I had posted on Instagram way back in 2018. My work has improved since then, and this particular shot is one that I wouldn’t consider up to my normal standards now, but all the same it sparked something in her. For all the talk about the cult of immediacy and the ills of social media, there’s still something to be said for having an easy-to-find public archive of one’s artwork.
Agreed. IG is terrible. But attention spans were already a problem. I am on IG in a very limited capacity. And I prefer to use it as a connection to other photographers. I save meaningful interaction with photography for books. 🙏
Instagram and social media, in general, seem as though they're the holy grail every creative must have to grow their business and be seen. I suspect this is as intentional as anything else that's advertised to us all. The whole process of scrolling is exhausting (a person can't possibly keep up with every feed on every platform). It's not healthy to even try! IG scrolling impacts my image-making negatively. While I'm inspired by the work I see, I often wind up comparing my work to others and I feel it's distracting more than anything.
Ok, this subject has been a bit of an obsession for me lately. As reflected in my writing on here and my blog. Yes, absolutely Instagram changed the game. The endless stream of imagery. But not just Instagram, it came along, coupled with the iPhone which put a pretty damn good camera in everyone’s pocket. The sheer number of images being created skyrocketed. The concept that you could grow an audience, a following was suddenly accessible. Image makers were getting discovered on Instagram by real art directors, art buyers, ad agencies. It became the place where you’d show your pictures and your life. Your portfolio and your personal work. It took a minute, but eventually EVERY commercial photographer had an instagram. So yeah, an endless stream of imagery that got better and better and now we’re numb to it. However, I do believe that this Darwinian struggle has also had the side effect of raising the visual literacy of the average citizen. There is a lot of good imagery out there. It’s interesting that in this moment, I’m seeing this question being posed all over the web. Now that social media seems to be slowing down. Eating its own tail. Ouroboros.
You carefully isolate the commercial with the "fine art" track, which I participated in for decades as an art director and program manager at top agency and corporate levels. But are "we" numb to the endless stream of viewing IG visionaries? We can become fatiqued, but numb? Perhaps we just need to take a minute to gather and organize our intentions and release some of the deadline-critical mind rot, no matter how lucrative and empowering the whole marketing game can be...
When IG started it was definitely a photography platform that was interesting and inspiring. The more it grew and the need to turn investment into profit the more it moved away from this. It is now, at best, a time sucking evil, at worst, a mirror to the vanity and vacuousness of huge swathes of society. IG plays on this by asking its 'users' to dance a little fucking dance in order for more engagement. It knows its users desperately crave this and they'll do anything for more likes and followers. Subsequently the idea of any kind of creative endeavor being viewed on the platform is not done through the lens of craft appreciation but through monetization and short cuts. How many accounts do you see that post about 'achieving the film look' or 'get the cinematic look' etc etc. It isn't about learning photography and trying to work out your own style or voice. It's simply a mechanism in which to copy what achieved high engagement for someone else. I don't work for Flickr or more recently the new Fotoapp but these platforms take the way we engage with photography much more seriously. In short they just care more about it. IG does not care about photography and if the platform doesn't care about it then this will only rub off on most of the users who will just see photography as more disposable 'content'. God... this makes me sound very bitter. I'm not bitter I just fucking hate Instagram and its parent company. I'd like to pull it out at the plug and it will all be gone in a bloodless pop.
"When it all began with IG," is not ancient history. Perhaps the digital natives feel there was no active visual presence before it emerged as a viable professional networking channel. Prior to that, we immersed ourselves in reading, researching, experimentation. Yes, a lot of it insular. But didn't that expand the collective consciousness? So, yes, now social media is ubiquitous. And??? It's circular perpetuity. And, yet, we are experiencing variations on a theme.
While Instagram, Facebook, etc., have certainly had impacts on engagement, I still think that change pales in comparison to the fact that over 55% of people are seeing these images on a mobile device, and those screens average around 6.3 inches.
Good point. Scale is one aspect of the generation and absorption of online content, ie imagery. Yet, it does require understanding the reproduction methodologies of virtually all media channels.
Thank you for opening up another wonderful discussion. Without taking too much of your time, here are my two cents. I think one specific category of photographs/photography that has been particularly impacted by social media has been "travel photography". Travel has been, for understandable reasons, one of the biggest "influencing" categories. As a result, for those of us who are into travel photography, the line between producing travel photography/writing and doing "influencer" things became very blurred too quickly. Even the requirements of paid travel assignments changed almost right away with demands to produce Instagrammable photos and then "videos/reels". I struggled with this for a long time and started to genuinely dislike the work that I produced. Finally, the only cure that I could find was to put all my energy into my own website (a place of sanity outside of the algorithmic parameters). Substack has also been a haven so far but I know that if I am not careful, it can start to feel like Instagram very quickly and I can fall into the same algorithmic traps and then start despising the platform.
I spose the quality of the discussion has changed. The enormous amount of content at the fingertips makes it hard to focus. As far as feedback, does a ‘like’ mean I’m blown away or it’s just an okay picture. If I make a comment, Im never sure if it comes across as too critical. There’s not much room for nuance in the comment box.
You've hit that right! Criticism is not a "Like" or a "Heart". I miss the intellectualization of criticism; not just the personal opions cloaked as "criticism".
For the first 35 years of my career, which started in 1976, I made landscapes with a 4x5 view camera. My digital work continues in the same methodic manner, often with multiple subjects in complex compositions. Seen as large prints on the wall, they engage the viewer for years, however, displayed as thumbnails that are scrolled by quickly on any social media platform, they are passed over in favor of gaudy, simple images. I am constantly frustrated by my posts of really strong images being ignored, while a snapshot of a cliché sunrise getting a huge response. Simplicity and over saturation seem to be the keys to social media success, but have nothing to do with good art. I most enjoy showing people REAL fine art prints in my gallery. Slowing going through stacks, telling stories, and giving each print the necessary time for the viewer to fully understand and appreciate my intentions.
I think you are lucky that you've had a "real experience" before social media. For those like me who started after it is easy to be confused about the the success of "cliché sunrise"...
There was a time when Instagram was essential for me, to make friends, meet colleagues, scout subjects, find work, grow my audience, but with time Instagram's economic incentives changed and the platform changed, for the worse.
It has devolved in many ways to pandering to our vague interests. Quite distracting. As in the early days of browser pop-ups, these social channels have muddied the waters of research. Back to the Wikipedia-style content structures is a noble concept. Oh, wait, there is now Substack. :-)
Instagram was great in the beginning. I jumped over from 500px and I enjoyed the social aspect that came with interacting with other photographers. But now that everyone with an iPhone and an Instagram account is a “photographer”, my opinions on social media have changed. I’ve had a camera since I was 10, a masters in fine art photography, and a 12 year career in commercial photography before digital ever happened. Galleries and print were the only ways to get your work out there. Now I’m getting back to that, the true feel of photography. I shoot film again, focus on my website, submitting to galleries, and printing books. I decided that instead of giving something else all my energy, I would just make my own magazine. And that’s how I ended up here. I started writing and sharing photos, and in about a month my magazine will go to print. So much more rewarding than social media. I still look through instagram occasionally. YouTube is better for inspiration and knowledge in my opinion. What social media makes you forget is that we survived long before it was ever here, and there are countless professional photographers who have great careers and don’t use social media. Now that I am focused on my own projects off social media, I don’t even have time for it anymore, it has become secondary, if even a consideration at all. Just shift your focus to your work and your ideas, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Social media is not the enemy, yet it does require the keen ability to compartmentalize our mental activities and all the other aspects that come with building and optimizing an online presence.
In the MFA grad years, there was huge pressure to find your gallery, your shows, and participate in all the churning that goes with that. I went to work in the design field instead. Finally, I am allowing my mind to wander in the creative spirit realm using the vission/mission structure as countermeasure.
Kudos on breaking through to the other side!
Carolyn I remember that pressure. I do find the rewards of the “old ways” far outweigh the short lasting rewards of social media. It does have its place and I agree it is not always the enemy. It can be used to advantage. However, I feel that we can get lost in the cycle of beginning projects based on social media influence and not seeing those thru to maturity and depth before the next new shiny thing crosses our feed. I’m all for getting inspiration from social media when you need it, but then put it aside and use what’s inside ourselves to give out work true meaning and not just another dramatic colorful photo. Happy shooting!
Your words resonate so much! Thank you for sharing. I quoted you on this:
"What social media makes you forget is that we survived long before it was ever here, and there are countless professional photographers who have great careers and don’t use social media."
Thank you for sharing your experience.
Thank you Ash! Happy shooting!
I can so relate to this. I started as an E6 processor in London in the 80s. I complement you on moving away from any social media platforms. I hope, if I can get the courage, to also start my own web site. The truth is I fear it being a ghost town so I refrain from trying. Also as it's not for a career but only as a hobby, at 67 yrs it never seems to inspire an urgency in me.
Thank you Joseph I remember using the E6 machines! Even if you’re just making a website for fun it can be rewarding to see the accomplishment. Happy shooting!
The biggest lie of IG in its current iteration is that if you consume more, you can create more. But the reality is that the more you consume, the less you create… the less you live.
For the artist, the photographer, it is taking the very foundation it needs to create and share the work. Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “We photo-reporters are people who supply information to a world in a hurry, a world weighted down with preoccupations, prone to cacophony, and full of beings with a hunger for information and needing the companionship of images.” How can we supply the world with images when the pressure to be in a hurry and create so much content catch up with anyone? Less attainable in a feed full of ads and sponsored posts that drive the viewer OUT of the app and into a checkout page. It is requiring more from the artist to pause, retract and THEN come back to the platform to engage.
It promotes disassociation and mindless scrolling because we are taking all of the noise in and overwhelming our systems without processing it.
Photography was a lifestyle. Taking photos with a camera was just the first step in a series of steps to create photos. Developing, scanning, enlarging and printing went hand in hand. There was a dedication to a handful of images and a story rather that excess.
Instagram robs me of the possibility to engage with work that moves me. I prefer to engage with the author offline and will often opt to buy their photo book and meditate in a body of work. IG will never replace a museum visit or a gallery exhibit in real life.
My opinion is that Instagram promotes extreme shallowness both in appreciating photography and in making pictures.
The good news is that you can always leave it. I deleted my account about two years ago and I’m way happier as a photographer and as a person ever since.
I'm quite ashamed of admitting it but, not only I have the bad habit of scrolling without really looking, but when I take pictures for myself and for my projects, in the back of my mind, there's always the same thought: "Is this picture going to work on Instagram? Is it going to be liked by people?".
I have serious trouble on photographing without thinking this all the time. I want to go back to a time where I take pictures only for the sake of it, not because it has to work in a social platform.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'm definitely going to read it.
I recently had a potential client who shared with me one of her favorite photographs that I had taken— and it was a snapshot I had posted on Instagram way back in 2018. My work has improved since then, and this particular shot is one that I wouldn’t consider up to my normal standards now, but all the same it sparked something in her. For all the talk about the cult of immediacy and the ills of social media, there’s still something to be said for having an easy-to-find public archive of one’s artwork.
I agree. Thanks for sharing, Shane. Good to see you here!
Essentially we don’t take time to “smell the roses” on SM. Promoting of our pictorial websites on SM is rather ideal.
Agreed. IG is terrible. But attention spans were already a problem. I am on IG in a very limited capacity. And I prefer to use it as a connection to other photographers. I save meaningful interaction with photography for books. 🙏
Instagram and social media, in general, seem as though they're the holy grail every creative must have to grow their business and be seen. I suspect this is as intentional as anything else that's advertised to us all. The whole process of scrolling is exhausting (a person can't possibly keep up with every feed on every platform). It's not healthy to even try! IG scrolling impacts my image-making negatively. While I'm inspired by the work I see, I often wind up comparing my work to others and I feel it's distracting more than anything.
Ok, this subject has been a bit of an obsession for me lately. As reflected in my writing on here and my blog. Yes, absolutely Instagram changed the game. The endless stream of imagery. But not just Instagram, it came along, coupled with the iPhone which put a pretty damn good camera in everyone’s pocket. The sheer number of images being created skyrocketed. The concept that you could grow an audience, a following was suddenly accessible. Image makers were getting discovered on Instagram by real art directors, art buyers, ad agencies. It became the place where you’d show your pictures and your life. Your portfolio and your personal work. It took a minute, but eventually EVERY commercial photographer had an instagram. So yeah, an endless stream of imagery that got better and better and now we’re numb to it. However, I do believe that this Darwinian struggle has also had the side effect of raising the visual literacy of the average citizen. There is a lot of good imagery out there. It’s interesting that in this moment, I’m seeing this question being posed all over the web. Now that social media seems to be slowing down. Eating its own tail. Ouroboros.
You carefully isolate the commercial with the "fine art" track, which I participated in for decades as an art director and program manager at top agency and corporate levels. But are "we" numb to the endless stream of viewing IG visionaries? We can become fatiqued, but numb? Perhaps we just need to take a minute to gather and organize our intentions and release some of the deadline-critical mind rot, no matter how lucrative and empowering the whole marketing game can be...
When IG started it was definitely a photography platform that was interesting and inspiring. The more it grew and the need to turn investment into profit the more it moved away from this. It is now, at best, a time sucking evil, at worst, a mirror to the vanity and vacuousness of huge swathes of society. IG plays on this by asking its 'users' to dance a little fucking dance in order for more engagement. It knows its users desperately crave this and they'll do anything for more likes and followers. Subsequently the idea of any kind of creative endeavor being viewed on the platform is not done through the lens of craft appreciation but through monetization and short cuts. How many accounts do you see that post about 'achieving the film look' or 'get the cinematic look' etc etc. It isn't about learning photography and trying to work out your own style or voice. It's simply a mechanism in which to copy what achieved high engagement for someone else. I don't work for Flickr or more recently the new Fotoapp but these platforms take the way we engage with photography much more seriously. In short they just care more about it. IG does not care about photography and if the platform doesn't care about it then this will only rub off on most of the users who will just see photography as more disposable 'content'. God... this makes me sound very bitter. I'm not bitter I just fucking hate Instagram and its parent company. I'd like to pull it out at the plug and it will all be gone in a bloodless pop.
"When it all began with IG," is not ancient history. Perhaps the digital natives feel there was no active visual presence before it emerged as a viable professional networking channel. Prior to that, we immersed ourselves in reading, researching, experimentation. Yes, a lot of it insular. But didn't that expand the collective consciousness? So, yes, now social media is ubiquitous. And??? It's circular perpetuity. And, yet, we are experiencing variations on a theme.
While Instagram, Facebook, etc., have certainly had impacts on engagement, I still think that change pales in comparison to the fact that over 55% of people are seeing these images on a mobile device, and those screens average around 6.3 inches.
Thanks for your time and writings, Andy.
— (a different) Andy
Good point. Scale is one aspect of the generation and absorption of online content, ie imagery. Yet, it does require understanding the reproduction methodologies of virtually all media channels.
Thank you for opening up another wonderful discussion. Without taking too much of your time, here are my two cents. I think one specific category of photographs/photography that has been particularly impacted by social media has been "travel photography". Travel has been, for understandable reasons, one of the biggest "influencing" categories. As a result, for those of us who are into travel photography, the line between producing travel photography/writing and doing "influencer" things became very blurred too quickly. Even the requirements of paid travel assignments changed almost right away with demands to produce Instagrammable photos and then "videos/reels". I struggled with this for a long time and started to genuinely dislike the work that I produced. Finally, the only cure that I could find was to put all my energy into my own website (a place of sanity outside of the algorithmic parameters). Substack has also been a haven so far but I know that if I am not careful, it can start to feel like Instagram very quickly and I can fall into the same algorithmic traps and then start despising the platform.
I spose the quality of the discussion has changed. The enormous amount of content at the fingertips makes it hard to focus. As far as feedback, does a ‘like’ mean I’m blown away or it’s just an okay picture. If I make a comment, Im never sure if it comes across as too critical. There’s not much room for nuance in the comment box.
You've hit that right! Criticism is not a "Like" or a "Heart". I miss the intellectualization of criticism; not just the personal opions cloaked as "criticism".
Instagram is non existing for me, as a commercial studio photographer it does not work for me. So NO, Instagram did not change anything.
I like your answer. Hits on what I was talking about. Professional photographers, not instagrammers with iPhones, don’t have time for it.
For the first 35 years of my career, which started in 1976, I made landscapes with a 4x5 view camera. My digital work continues in the same methodic manner, often with multiple subjects in complex compositions. Seen as large prints on the wall, they engage the viewer for years, however, displayed as thumbnails that are scrolled by quickly on any social media platform, they are passed over in favor of gaudy, simple images. I am constantly frustrated by my posts of really strong images being ignored, while a snapshot of a cliché sunrise getting a huge response. Simplicity and over saturation seem to be the keys to social media success, but have nothing to do with good art. I most enjoy showing people REAL fine art prints in my gallery. Slowing going through stacks, telling stories, and giving each print the necessary time for the viewer to fully understand and appreciate my intentions.
I think you are lucky that you've had a "real experience" before social media. For those like me who started after it is easy to be confused about the the success of "cliché sunrise"...
There was a time when Instagram was essential for me, to make friends, meet colleagues, scout subjects, find work, grow my audience, but with time Instagram's economic incentives changed and the platform changed, for the worse.
It has devolved in many ways to pandering to our vague interests. Quite distracting. As in the early days of browser pop-ups, these social channels have muddied the waters of research. Back to the Wikipedia-style content structures is a noble concept. Oh, wait, there is now Substack. :-)