At some point in 2010, I began to see incredible pictures popping up on my Facebook feed. They had borders, blurred edges and filters. “Wow Cory’s a good photographer, I never knew”. Turns out Cory, as well over 80 other million users, have logged onto Instagram. Instagram.com describes the experience as “Snap a photo with your mobile phone, then choose a filter to transform the image into a memory to keep around forever.” These photographs continue to come up on my Facebook feed, and they certainly are beautiful to look at, but I wondered if this new advent would piss off professionally trained photographers.
The art critic Michael Glover recently commented on the new user-photography phenomenon by saying, "Photography has become so thoroughly prostituted as a means of visual exchange, available to all or none for every purpose under the sun that it is easy to forget that until recently one of the most important consequences of fearless photographic practice was to tell the truth about power." He certainly won’t be logging into Instagram any time soon. And it doesn’t sound like Chris Ziegler of the site “The Verge” will either. “The Verge” is a website that covers tech, science, art & culture. Ziegler recently called these photos “damaged photos”. Maybe Ziegler will come around, but right now he sounds like a typical hyper-critical tech guy. There are those though, who embrace Instagram in the field of photography. I often log on to Scott Schuman’s fashion blog “The Sartorialist”, where he uploads portrait photographs taken with a Digital SLR, and Instagram. Both turn out beautiful, perhaps the SLR one’s more, but they are all produced from a professional. Another professional photographer, Peter Essick, who works for National Geographic recently said that he “looks at it as another medium to use as a photographer.”
Whatever the “art world” has to say about Instagram and other filters apps, it doesn’t speak nearly as loud as the actual Instagram community. The creators of instagram said “We love taking photos. We always assumed taking interesting photos required a big bulky camera and a couple years of art school. But as mobile phone cameras got better and better, we decided to challenge that assumption.” That challenge has produced a simple way to produce unique images, after all, 80 million plus people are currently enjoying it.