How Instagram hit photo-sharing gold
By Alex Gilks,
Instagram has tapped into something. Obviously. But what gives it aesthetic currency?
When I was in sixth form classics, the zenith of visual communication
for a student involved spilling instant coffee on your research project
wall chart the night before it was due. It would still have just enough
time to dry, but you had to be careful that your hand-drawn classical
ornamental device (egg and dart moulding pattern, for example, or egg
and chips, if you were given to nonsense) was drawn in black ball-point
or permanent marker, not in one of those other bloody ink pens, or else a
whole section of your submission would run a murky cloud, with black
seeping under your pasted-on cut-out photocopies of ruins, and working
on the floor next to your bed at 11:59, you’d be tempted to just sod the
whole thing.
The brown liquid (local Gregg’s coffee, or Tiger or Bell Tea) would
stain areas of the cartridge paper a yellow-brown. It looked old and
warm and somehow authentic. Almost exactly like the Dead Sea Scrolls,
you thought. The archaic pastiche was complete if you carefully burned
some of the edges of the poster with some matches. There ain’t no
software filter for that.
Anyway, fast forward 20-something years, and the aesthetic whimsy-de-jour for shared happy-snappy photos is broadly ’1970s-esque grunge’: desaturated, but heavy on the yellow, high-contrast, square format, leaking light, dust, and sundry textures.
Why does Instagram have, for now at least, such aesthetic currency?
‘Good’ photography is easy
Not really. Most of the awesome things about ‘good’ photos are still special, and hard to achieve. But it isn’t so hard for people to get sharp, high resolution, brightly-lit and richly saturated images, since cameras with goodish lenses are way more affordable, and the default settings on cameras are geared towards making things look like the pro stock photos. And when that becomes the norm, people have to find their cosy sub-cultural space elsewhere.
So, when even mum and
dad’s photos can pop like the Sony Bravia coloured balls ad, Junior
feels more at home with the sweat and urine-soaked feel of Dad’s
partying youth (though Junior was actually thinking of the video for
Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box which he discovered during exams last year).
The paradox of lush
Texture and depth look really nice with the flatness
and luminosity of screens. As with the prevalence of decent quality
digital SLR cameras, it’s easy for stuff to look good on screen, so we
like images that work harder to grab our attention. Six hundred years
after the ‘discovery’ of perspective, we are still smitten with the
illusion of depth.
Affecting personal history
It’s not like there weren’t good cameras in the 1970s. But Instagram
ties in naturally with a keenness for LOMO cameras, Holgas and the like:
picture-making technology that links us to the fuzzy and innocent
images of our parents’ photo albums, all faded Polaroids and woollen
jerseys and long wavy grass. The difference is, with real Polaroids you
have the commitment of money; with Lomo and Holga it’s money and funny
film and time, and learning how to use a clunky old box. With websites
and software, it’s pretty much instant and free to mess with photos,
although you won’t have such an effective printed result. Or no prints
at all.
The iCrowd
There’s an exclusiveness about using apps and websites to do everyday
things, even if we don’t want to admit it. It’s not just owning and
knowing how to use gizmos and sharing functions, it’s understanding what
the heck it means and what people are saying that eludes older and less
educated people. It can feel special to share things with like-minded
people. It isn’t likely though that many great living photographers will
check out your Instagram photos, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Using Instagram tells people that you have an iPhone or an Android
phone, and you know how to use the App Store or Google Play. When you
use it, you are advertising for Apple and Google, and now Facebook.
Speed scrapbooking
A curious feature is that a lot of Instagram users are youngish types who are quite design-savvy, and would be able to figure out how to achieve Instagram-style effects in Photoshop using colour adjustments and layer blending, which would allow them to do it with greater control and subtlety. Or, y’know, learn to use the SLR camera settings, old fashioned camera lens filters, or even do stuff in the darkroom.
But that takes time to do; you can’t do it on the fly. Which is pretty much the point. Digital cameras meant we could fire off a dozens of shots of the cat at no cost, delete some later, and maybe a couple are worth going back to. Sharing photos, creating categories, discovering odd groups and participating in online albums became sophisticated with Flickr. And more recently, Instagram means less discretion in the photography and publishing process, but it’s a much more streamlined way of sticking things online which are just having the bare minimum of personalisation.
So it’s more, faster, and about Being Relevant in social media: persistent but not TL;DR, technologically up-to-date (albeit with a dollop of irony), familiar and uncritical, Big Internet-branded shoot-from-the-hip homogenous intimacy.
Alex Gilks is a graphic designer in Dunedin (it's in the South Island). He does some teaching, and dabbles in this and that.
Comments
Grant
Wow, I think this article really misses the point. As an Instagram user I see it's value as being much simpler. Here's my top 3 reasons I think people find it valuable:
1. It makes your photos more beautiful. Instagram's simple effects can help you extract the feeling, emotion, or beauty of the moment, that you want to share.
2. It encourages the sharing of photos as art - not just things. Instagram embraces the creative and artistic aspect of photo-taking. It makes you *feel* more creative and proud of what you share.
3. It lets you share them the way you want. There's different audiences for the photos you take, so being able to choose between your Twitter, Facebook, or (smaller) Instagram network, really matters. It encourages use.
By recognising these aspects of photo taking and sharing, which Facebook didn't cater to, Instagram more fully succeeds at being the one tool you'd turn to to share your life-stream (as told through your photos). That's exactly where Facebook wants to be, and that's why they bought it.
Luigi Cappel
I have to go with Grant on this. I think this article is trying to intellectualize Instagram. I like to share photographic impressions of places I visit. It's not about showing off or being clever. I am not of the hunger tech savvy age group. I am a reasonably good photographer and own some expensive Canon SLR camera gear. When I want serious photos I use a serious camera and perhaps editing software.
Instagram has captured the viral social sphere through its simplicity of use and because people enjoy sharing and IMHO it's that simple.
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