The Art Hustle with #weloveatl’s Tim Moxley
Startup Exchange’s “Art Hustle” brought Tim Moxley of #weloveatl and Allen Vella of the Fox Theatre to talk about the innerworkings of their organizations and lessons they learned along the way.
Perhaps most importantly, Tim says, the tag was “a proclamation”. It embraced the city as a focal point while declaring affection for and allegiance to it.
#weloveatl
#weloveatl is most known for its popular Instagram hashtag for which it is named. The organization runs an account on the service that curates selected posts with the hashtag that align with their mission.
What do they do?
Besides running a kick-ass Instafeed, #weloveatl’s mission is to:
…connect, support and build Atlanta’s photography community online and off and curate and present the work of that community in non-traditional galleries and installations throughout the city in order to promote love of Atlanta and support local non-profits throughout the city.
That’s nice, but what do they do? The org takes the pictures they’ve selected through their Instatag (with permission of course), prints them off, and creates galleries with them. Each print is attributed to the original photographer and #weloveatl promises to create only one print for use in the show (Read: you get to keep all of your rights to your piece). The photos in the show are then sold with proceeds benefiting the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
The benefits of participating in such an operation are pretty obvious. Being featured by @weloveatl’s feed isn’t trivial. They have just over 38K followers which makes them a sizable network to be broadcast on. The shows themselves provide a periodic, centralized forum for artists and enthusiasts alike to showcase their work while celebrating, and helping, the city. As such, the events are intrinsically press-worthy and have been known to bring out the occasional art director looking for local talent.
The Wisdom of Tim Moxley
So they set out to try and change the way Atlanta was portrayed.
Why #weloveatl?
Tim says the whole thing started with him and two buddies — also photographers. They saw that other cities had huge collections of high quality images while Atlanta had very few — at least from a quality and sentiment stand point. So they set out to try and change the way Atlanta was portrayed.
He says they’d never heard of an Instashow — a show consisting of images gathered on Instagram — being hosted in Atlanta before. They thought it might be cool to host one, so they did it.
In October 2012, they advertised a potential spot in the show for those who submitted a picture to their hashtag. By the end of the month, they had over 5,000 submissions.
As for the tag itself, #weloveatl only had one picture on it, meaning they wouldn’t have to sort through thousands of false positives to find their pictures (posts submitted with the tag that weren’t for their project).
Perhaps most importantly, Tim says the tag was “a proclamation”. It embraced the city as a focal point while declaring affection for and allegiance to it.
The message here is clear: long-term impact over making a quick buck.
How #weloveatl Operates
He says they want keep the whole operation “grassroots” and inclusive — a project to support the community, not to promote it. This means that they’ve made it a core principle to turn down paid promotion on their feeds — though he added they’d love to talk sponsor/partnerships/more money with a laugh.
Too many times he’s seen Instagram feeds get really big then sell out, as if the whole point of creating such a large audience was to sell them off to the highest bidder. The message here is clear: long-term impact over making a quick buck.
This means the organization operates on a shoe string budget. While they end up making money from the art shows, they put as much as possible towards helping the community. This bootstrap mentality is exemplified by their choice in non-profit and the make-up of the staff.
Proceeds benefit the Atlanta Community Food Bank because they offer the best bang for their buck. For every $1 donated, they give four meals to the hungry. Pretty good conversion, if you ask me.
As for the staff, #weloveatl is run by seven volunteers. They each play specific roles in the org, although Tim says he and his co-founders try to keep the worst bits of running the organization off the shoulders of the other volunteers whenever possible.
As for who gets to curate the feed for which they are known, the power, and responsibility, is shared. The “mantle” is passed around from member to member daily in what I assume is a semi-regular cycle.
Their footprint has grown to over 38K followers and 380K posts submitted to their hashtag.
Plans for Expansion
It seems the organization doesn’t have any plans to grow to unicorn status this year. But that shouldn’t surprise you, considering their focus on sticking to their grassroots principles.
Their primary concern right now is growing their reach. Tim says he still finds it astounding that so many people he meets have never heard of #weloveatl before. Their footprint has grown to over 38K followers and 380K posts submitted to their hashtag. Remember, they started it just 3.5 years ago when it had only 1.
#weloveatl started a new initiative to create a video installation, pictured here, which displays selected pictures (those that receive a like and comment from their account) submitted to their tag along with the handle of the submitter’s profile. Last year, they put one in the atrium of the CNN Center which receives around 2–3 million visitors per annum. The team is in the process of setting up another one at Hartsfield Jackson which would dramatically increase their reach (they served 7.7M passengers in January 2016 alone).
The impact of the org seems to rely heavily on the amount of money they can make, which in turn is dependent on their reach. Their reach affects the quantity of interested photographers and, thus, the quality of submitted pictures, the number of people interested in attending their galleries, and the amount of money each of the selected pictures will go for.
To put it simply, their reach has a large hand in the quantity and quality of their goods, the size of their prospective market, and the demand for the goods themselves.
You still see those who use it for “party pics”, but there’s a growing community of users who carefully curate their feed to display their work.
The Role of Instagram for Artists
Tim says Instagram is the new website/portfolio for alot of artists to build their brand. While websites are still awesome, Instagram provides a negligible bar of entry along with built-in community and discoverability features. Add on top of this its sleek, minimal design and it’s easy to see how the platform could be considered as an alternative or at least auxiliary branding tool.
He believes it differentiates itself from other social networks through the type of people who use it and the way in which it displays posts. Whereas Facebook has become saturated with the technically inept, and Twitter has always had a problem with signal vs. noise, Instagram has yet to be picked up by the mass public (plus its follow feature allows you to subscribe only to the posts of feeds you want to see).
You still see those who use it for “party pics”, but there’s a growing community of users who carefully curate their feed to display their work. The platform itself pushes attention towards the image, often hiding auxiliary information below the fold or behind a “Read more…” button.
The Time-Breakdown of a Pro Photographer
Tim says for a given shoot, he usually spends 80% of the time planning and 20% on execution. As an example, he says for a hypothetical 8 hr shoot, he probably spends 24 hrs planning for it. I realize this is actually a 75/25 split between planning and execution, but cut him some slack. This is just an example and he’s a professional photographer, not a professional mathematician.
What is the Most Beautiful Place in Atlanta?
Struggling to narrow it down to just one, he threw out:
- The skyline from the Jackson St. Bridge
- The helipad on top of the W
- Piedmont Park
A Place Most People don’t Know About, but Should
Lullwater park, saying it’s magnificent in the spring.
Life Lessons
Tim says the one thing that sticks out is “There’s nothing to it, but to do it.”
In other words, what are you waiting for?
Tim Moxley
Tim Moxley is the Executive Director and Co-founder of #weloveatl. When he’s not working on #weloveatl, he works as an advertising photographer.
To learn more about him, check out his website, find him on Twitter, or, better yet, check out his personal Instagram.
