How Instagram can turn anyone into a photographer: An Ethnographic Vignette
When Instagram first launched in 2010 I had no interest in this app, primarily because the app was exclusively for the iOS mobile platform and I only had an Android phone. But when the app was released for Android devices in 2012, a friend took my phone while we were going out to lunch one day and downloaded the app. She created an account for me and told me to start using it because it was a fun app that she believed I can apply my artistic skills on it. At first I was hesitant on using Instagram because I was never interested in taking photos or had any passion for photography. But after spending some time exploring the app, I grew to enjoy Instagram and eventually started to take more photos of my life.
Instagram has become a creative outlet for anyone with a mobile device. With a growing photo-sharing community that offers amazing work of art, one can get easily hooked. With Instagram, you are no longer limited to having an expensive high-quality camera to take great photos. The app makes it extremely easy and makes it less time-consuming in editing your photos unlike Photoshop. With the simplicity of the app, users have the ability to post any kind of photos, as long as it doesn’t go against the terms of use and community guidelines of course.
Hashtags became popular on media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. With the use of hashtags, photos are categorized and will be visible on an organized hashtag page filled with other photos with the same hashtags. Hashtags help the process of content discovery and optimization. The more you use hashtags, the higher the chances of your post being seen by the community. But this will only work if your account is not set on private. There are instances where certain posts went viral thanks to the user’s creative and hilarious use of hashtags.
But when photo-sharing become so easy, how does one differentiate good art from great art? How does one create a great profile? Here is where the user must learn that it’s about quality over quantity. A good artist should treat their Instagram profile like a portfolio. Their contents should be consistent with one another and shouldn’t have any photos that may seem out of place from the rest. So how does one fix that problem? Simple. Create a separate profile specifically for your work and keep the personal photos in your personal profile.
In A Problem Of Presence, author Matthew Engelke mentioned the idea of ‘native agency’ when he introduced a Protestant missionary by the name of Henry Venn. Venn focused on ‘native agency,’ where just as Africans should be able to read, so too should they direct their own churches. To Venn, he believed that the Bible should be the basis of one’s teaching and that the Bible could transform any human being into a good Christian. This logic can be applied to the people who use Instagram. Not everyone is a photographer nor are they highly skilled in photo-editing software like Photoshop. But with Instagram, you are presented a wide selection of different filters at your disposal and options to edit a photo before uploading it. It invokes the creativity of the user in creating a photo that they believe to be ‘Instagram-worthy.’ With Instagram, once you have the basic knowledge of using a camera where you simply point and shoot, the media platform will then supply you the tools needed. In comparison, Instagram is like the Bible and the Christians are the photographers. Not all photographers use Instagram but that doesn't make them any less of a photographer. Some photographers are simply camera-shy.
