#caughtgramming: Instagram & Image Maker Insecurity
What is it about Instagram that keeps photographers fretting?
I’ve studied photography for a while, I like taking photos, and I wish kodak hadn’t abandoned analog photography, because I’m Team Film if we’re picking sides. And I’m pretty into Instagram.
Is that contradictory? It feels like a logical progression to me, but since Instagram popped up in 2010, snide debates among photographers regarding the app and its relation to The Photographic Canon (which is where, by the way?) have sustained.
Instagram is for posers & wannabes.
Instagram is okay, depending on how you use it.
Instagram is not photography because there’s too much automation. No control, no skill.
Instagram is great for Professional Photographers.
Instagram bastardizes our dreamy Holga photos! These kids don’t know what x-pro means!
Likes don’t mean you’re a good photographer!
Art Photographers [see: image makers] should not use Instagram.
At this point—also known as Nowadays—whether a photographer does or doesn’t use the app seems to be less at issue than how they use it (are you using the rule of thirds?), and what it means to them (Is it art? Promotional? Do you show your clients?) For photography enthusiasts, the apparent criteria are familiar. Legitimacy as an image maker is linked to the Maker’s level of knowledge, of skill, and degree of control over the process. And there must be a process.
Photography itself is still very new, a toddler among visual mediums, and photographic practice on the whole has yet to shake this long-standing insecurity. You can’t just “take” photographs if you want recognition, you have to “make” them (and don’t call it a photograph, call it an image, call it a C-Print). It only follows that an app like Instagram, built as it is of nostalgia-laden photographic motifs, would catch both the ire and interest of photographers.
Today, however, I’d like us to set all this aside. Let’s forget about what Instagram means for Photography and think about what “gramming” means to us Instagram users—all of us.
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My life as @yungchals
- I am visiting my cousin, catching up after a long absence. She uses her phone to illustrate anecdotes, pivots to show me her Instagram page. I spot a photo of her son and after I’ve oo-ed and aw-ed she says with playful irritation, “Yeah, fucked up my circle flow but it’s a nice picture so I put it up anyway.” We switch to the grid-view of her page and I see what she means. In a neat grid of 9, only 8 images have circular frames; if not for this singular square, her feed (at the time) would have consisted entirely of circular photos. For effect, obviously.
- I am huddled with my kid sister at a family function, catching up after a long absence. There are 8 years between us, so we cling to what common ground we find and peruse our respective Instagram pages together—each having already seen the other’s while apart. Now we can do so with irl commentary. My sister scrolls through my page in grid view and remarks,
“Wow you have a lot of posts.”
Well, I’ve had it more than a year.
“Don’t you ever delete anything?”
No.
She’s incredulous. Hers is a rigorously curated Instagram page, built to present a particular image of herself at any given time. No past selves here, obviously. - A user I follow has regrammed a video of a cat, originally posted by @matsumotoooooo. The cat is drinking from a tap as water splashes all over his head. Upon further investigation I find @matsumotoooooo’s page consists almost entirely of the same cat, often drinking water. I tap “FOLLOW”. Obviously.
My sister and cousin are not exceptional in their use of Instagram, nor @matsumotoooooo. The app’s premise proposes that everyone and anyone with a smart phone and wifi can use it, regardless of skill level, artistic sensibility, or technical know-how, so it should go without saying that photographers (or photo-enthusiasts) aren’t the only ones making images with it.
So why do so many Instagram think pieces stick to photographers? Why are themes of community, communication, and identity absent from most of these discussions, whereas they are very much a part of the conversation around Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter? And what is it that distinguishes Photography’s relationship to Instagram from its relationship to webcams? or OsX PhotoBooth? Do we presume that because Instagram is a kind of public space (save the few restricted accounts), usage itself is a statement? This last point, at least, is probably true, but I find it much less likely that this statement has always to do with our assemblage of Photography.
Now let’s think about how we’re using it, because the list is long.
Instagram can be a tool to:
sell
broadcast
meme-ify
network
memorialize
diarize
slander
…among so much else.
Could we think of Instagram as a communicative tool before we think of it as a photographic one? If so, the discussion absolutely must prioritize its actual use, not its use by photo-enthusiasts. For one, not all Instagram posts are photographs. Apart from videos and posts that are largely textual, there are image macros aplenty. Beyond that, we have any number of third party apps with which to add stickers, text, frames and more filters (always more filters).
It could be that Instagram cannot be considered a photographic tool proper, not if we consider the distinction between its own proposition to its users and that of VSCOCAM. Where VSCOCAM insists on fostering its own niche community of users who “love the process of creating”, Instagram finally upped its IM game by aligning its messaging feature with a more typical MMS format—a development which came a little late considering the app was acquired by Facebook in 2012.
If we limit our scope to “The World of Photography” when discussing Instagram practices, we fail to consider the vast majority of its practitioners, their aesthetics, and their motifs (pictures of food on a plate, anyone?). All those hundreds of millions of users who have no inclination to protect “serious photography” and whose Instagram practices are far more interesting.
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Epilogue
Just to be contradictory: photographer and Instagram user, Nick Spector, kindly shared his experience with me on the ‘gram.
This is such a cool way to think about how contemporary production of art is received culturally and publicly. The sense of “insecurity” or “inauthenticity” that I think a lot of people feel or notice is interesting, because it draws on anxieties about art-production that I think are classist and elitist in a lot of ways–why are people so stressed about anyone (with access to a phone & wifi) having a toolkit to make art, or to put out public content? I’m thinking about how instgram in particular doesn’t require any kind of formal training–so most people can get “good” at it. In a cultural circulation of art that has traditionally valued technical skill and training (i.e. thinks that require school, money, time), a medium that is more flexible and accessible disrupts those hierarchies of privilege and access.