A question for the times: When and how does one consider an image a “personal” image, versus one destined for entering the online public space?

Every night I am confronted with this problem: out of my day’s new photos, which ones do I keep to the confines of my iPhone’s storage, and which do I submit to various online social spaces? After just two months of becoming a regular Instagram user, my most common decision is to add anything remotely interesting from my phone in my Instagram feed… There are occasional images —a mildly embarrassing moment for a friend, an image I intended for reference only, my own face — that cause me to pause and reconsider. Yet the feeling of having an image on my iPhone which doesn’t make its way to the public at some point or another feels strangely foreign, and typically these are the images that are deleted during the periodic storage purge.

What images are not made for the public eye? One thing that is for certain, is how to distinguish the image that is: Almost undoubtedly, the easiest way to identify an image for the online public is to look for technical markings — the watermark, the Instagram filter, the overlaid inspirational quote. The draw and intrigue of the #nofilter category is related to the photographs’ special unpreparedness, the seemingly remarkable rawness of an image that can be released to the public eye without additional production.

It is now that I fully realize the strange draw of Lisa Iaboni’s collection of online photos: her method of finding the very type of images that seem altogether private, yet there they are, in a feed accessible to all. Were images ever meant to be personal in the first place? What use is an image to anyone if it lacks aesthetic qualities or contextual information? Even the “private” images of Snapchat are clearly marked, even when their fate is to be “deleted” eventually. The open secret of Snapchat of course, is that the guarantee of deletion or privacy was never sustainable.

What of the images that were destined to be deleted — actually deleted, because they’re too-boring-or-ugly deleted — from the get-go? Pictures taken of an ad you want to remember later, those deemed too unworthy for social media? Is there a way to replicate and create meaning from unmarked indiscriminateness?

Musings inspired by the Instagram Mini-Marathon sponsored by ForYourArt.com, July 26, 2014.