I’m returning to Italy after spending weeks in London taking photographs, with one persistent question on my mind: What remains of our photographs? What is the trajectory of their “earthly” life, when their overexposure on social media forces them into containers designed to generate memes, advertisements, and visual dystopia?
Let me be clear: I’m speaking as someone who’s directly involved and an (sometimes almost compulsive) Instagram user, but also—in my own small way—as an educator who observes firsthand the journey of those taking their first steps in photography.
Times have changed, and as communication theorist John Culkin once said: “We shape our tools, and subsequently, our tools shape us.”
We created social media platforms as a tool for sharing, but now it is the architecture of those platforms that shapes the way we view, capture, and even conceive of an image.
The question I keep asking myself is: Is Instagram a platform for images or for photographs?
Like all technological tools, social media brings positive benefits—it would be biased to deny that—but it is also changing paradigms, replacing value with validation, swallowing up data and spitting out trends, fads, and clones.
Are we sure that an algorithmic platform based on retention time (the time spent with our eyes glued to the screen) is the right platform to showcase our work—which we’ve handed over to a virtual slot machine that pays us in dopamine?
Up to this point, this might sound like the ramblings of a grumpy old man, but what I see is a mechanism that is strange, to say the least.
This short text won't provide any answers; rather, it raises questions:
Does talking about photography without having a well-developed background mean great freedom, or does it lead to great confusion?
Can following virtual validation without having taken any steps in the real world (prints, exhibitions, publications) lead to dissatisfaction, anger, or envy in the minds of those who are just getting into photography?
Turning photography into a contest with prizes certainly attracts a wider audience, but is this a sustainable model in the long run?
Let future generations be the judge.
Follow us on our Substack channel, too