Has anyone seen Instagram? Cute, isn't it? Did you know that the people who use it call their filtered, distorted, grainy photos "art"? I have four words for these people:
Instagram is not art.
You know what? That's not enough emphasis. Let's try this:
INSTAGRAM IS NOT ART.
Hopefully, an italic bold underlined over-sized typeface will get this message through to the fake-retro clouded brains of these pour souls.
For the benefit of those who don't know what Instagram is, let me explain. Instagram is a photo sharing service that lets those with smartphones, well, share their photos. At least, that's what it's supposed to do. In reality, what it ends up doing is destroying a lot of potentially great photos by slapping "artistic" filters over them.
I made an instagram'd copy of the first painting you think of when you think "art". Here's my version of the Mona Lisa:
There! I made Art! See how I added that film grain, tweaked the saturation and contrast, and put it into a Polaroid frame? Now it's Art, right? Wrong. There was absolutely no creative process involved. I simply clicked on one of 17 available photo filters. The only part that took any effort was putting both photos in front of a background and adding text. (I did that in Gimp.)
Why do people use these filters? Well, the answer lies in the past. Things from the past are generally perceived as being somewhat magical. Your grandmothers typewriter? Cool. Great-aunt-Bertha's vintage record player? Cool. So if we just make all of our photos look aged, then it logically follows that they will be more authentic and interesting. But the problem is that the majority of Instagrammers weren't even alive in the era they're trying to portray. A picture of your Macbook Air (circa 2011) made to look like a Polaroid (circa 1974) does not add any artistic value whatsoever. These filters are a very lazy habit to get into. Most of the photos on instagram are of feet, food, and coffee. (No, seriously.) If I showed you an untouched photo of my foot or my plate of scrambled eggs, you'd just give me a bored look and continue with your life. But if I do something to those photos to make them look more interesting (such as slapping a filter on them) then suddenly they grab your attention! Except for one thing: They look identical to all of the other 4,000,000 photos of feet and scrambled eggs on instagram. These are ruined photos. They don't capture a moment. They have no character. Their only flaws were put there on purpose. I'll tell you what: If you take a photo of your coffee mug, print it out, and leave it in the desert for 19 years, and then retrieve it and display it with all its scratches and sun-bleaching, then you've made a piece of art. Just like using paint-by-numbers doesn't make you a painter, using Instagram does not make you an artist.
Another reason you shouldn't use Instagram if you claim to be an artist is licensing. With the recent changes to Instagram's terms of service, any photo posted can be saved and used for commercial purposes. That's right: You own the photos, but you have no rights to them. So if a company wants to take the photo you took of your hamburger and use it for profit, there's nothing to stop them. It's legal, and you won't get a penny for your "work".
Are there alternatives to destroying your photos with faux-character and mass-produced authenticity? Yes. Yes there are. For starters, if you'd like to create nostalgia in your photos, then you should do absolutely nothing to them. Sure, your eight-megapixel iPhone camera looks great right now, but in 15 years your kids are gonna laugh at how grainy and low quality the images are. That's real nostalgia.
Changing the color of a photo of an everyday object such as a coffee mug does not make it unique. The only way to create truly unique photos is to take pictures of truly unique subjects, or use interesting techniques in your photography. That's a unique-ness that Instagram simply can't replace.