Don’t Lose Your Photography Behind Instagram
I am notorious for dogging on my generation and our use of social media. I could rant for days about how it’s ruining our face-to-face interactions, our relationships and our creativity. Essentially, I am among the many traditionalists who think it’s corroding our society. Yet, I keep my phone close by me at all times, like a new mother afraid of forgetting her newborn in the shopping cart at Target. I am tweeting incessantly, scrolling through Instagram and linking my articles on Facebook to show my former high school peers that I’m thriving on the other side. I’m a hypocrite.
But take a walk through Old Town Fort Collins, and you’ll see what I mean. Young trendy people wearing impractical hats strut around, stopping every few steps to snap a photo of their latte or a brick wall on their iPhones. And it makes you wonder: is this functional photography, or is it simply a trend?
Social media provides a vital platform for many up-and-coming photographers and visual storytellers. With a few clicks on a smart phone, creators are able to send their work across the world. The exposure that Instagram allows for is revolutionary and should be taken advantage of as a tool.
That being said, promoting photography through social media should remain a tool; not your business itself. Photography is easily lost and trivialized behind Instagram.
The other day I was listening to a podcast where the host was interviewing her mother who is a photographer in New York. This photographer, Laurie Simmons, was a part of the New York art scene in the 1970s. Not only was she experimenting with photography as a new and independent art medium, but she was one of the only women competing with the dominant pool of male photographers, trying to get her photos up next to theirs in galleries around the city.
What struck me was not only the fact that as a woman photographer, she struggled to get her work seen, but also how photographers’ main exposure was at art galleries. These artists would take their photos, develop them, and hang them on a wall, hoping people would be willing enough to gaze upon it for a few seconds.
In this moment I realized how significantly the photography scene has changed in recent years with the introduction of social media. Rather than competing for a gallery spot to display work in, 21st century photographers can simply upload a photo and share it with the masses in a matter of seconds. It sounds convenient and easy enough, but it has drastically shifted the art form.
Nowadays, you can get famous quick by using the right tags and following the right social media accounts. Promoting your photography work can quickly and seamlessly become self-promotion. Suddenly, the point of taking photos is lost in a sea of social traffic analytics.
This type of virtual activity leads to narcissistic tendencies. An article from Elite Daily discusses just this.
“Social media has come to serve as a platform not for engagement and interaction, but exaggerations and bragging, and creatives may, in fact, be the biggest offenders.”
However, running a photography business is different. It is virtually impossible to get work if you don’t have an active social media presence. Using Instagram for your business’ marketing purposes is unavoidable — and free.
In an article written by The Guardian, a professional photographer named Magda Rakita agrees. She says that technological advances do actually work to photographers’ advantage.
“Creating your audience is essential in a new financial model that increasingly relies on crowdfunding,” says Rakita.
But, taking photos simply for the sake of seeing how many likes it gets or how many new followers you receive is ridiculous and amateur. Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson are rolling in their graves.
Andrew Keen is the author of “The Cult of Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.” In an article from the BBC, he says that current practices of digital photography are annihilating the true craft.
“Photography has become so easy meaning that people don’t really think a photo has any intrinsic value,” he says. “And what concerns me most is that photographers as a profession are being decimated by online theft.”
The art of photography should extend beyond taking a photo to share with your Instagram followers with the expectation of hundreds of likes and an increase in followers. By doing this, you’re trivializing the experience of photography, and in a sense insulting bona fide photographers.
Using the right hashtags is not indicative of your talent. The amount of followers you have is not a gage for the passion you have for your photos. A ton of likes on a post does not necessarily mean that photo was good.
I speak to all up-and-coming photographers when I ask, what is your goal? To share photos you love or to get Insta-famous quickly? You should feel passionate about your photos; not the Instagram response.
In the words of Michael Nichols, photographer and editor-at-large of National Geographic, “I want people to remember the pictures, not my name or what I look like.”
