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.
I would disagree to some extent with the statement "Instagram is not art". It is not Instagram that is not art, rather it is the photographs that are put on Instagram that are not art. A picture that's no good in the first place can't be made good by split-toning white-balance-adjusting and tone-curve-tweaking. However a picture that is good can be made even better with judicious use of those tools. The problem is that digital photographs look ugly.
ReplyDeleteTrue statement: un-altered digital photographs look ugly. Nasty too. Downright hideous.
I've seen many otherwise impactful and moving digital photographs that have much of their beauty taken away from them by poor or no post-processing. If I had a smartphone I would use Instagram. Not to take grainy pictures of my lunch but to make decent (but ugly) pictures look a little better. Because they really do look really ugly. Like ick.
That's why I like film. It looks quite nice straight out-of-camera without being messed with. Not that film automatically makes a photograph art either. It takes the same care in composition to take a good film picture as a it does to take a good digital picture. The difference is that the film picture will already look beautiful while the digital one will not. There is a community of people who are part of the if-it's-on-film-then-it's-automatically-art school. This unfortunate movement revolves around a company called Lomography. They sell overpriced toy cameras with plastic lenses (while for the same price you could get a real film camera with a sharp, fast prime off ebay for the same price) and expired and generally messed up film. If you browse the photos there at all you'll see pretty much the same garbage you see on Instagram only the grain is real and the color shifts chemical. Yet these people think themselves somehow better than their Instagramming counterparts because they mess up their pictures before and while they take them rather than afterwords.
Art is not easy. Art requires skill. Art is not a one-click process. Your food is probably not art. It might be but it probably isn't.
[http://www.petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2013/01/filmvsdigitalcomic.jpg]
Yes, a photograph can be made better with the judicious use of those tools. However, Instagram does not provide any means by which to use the tools judiciously or precisely. Literally, there are 17 options. You tap the one you want and it uploads. That's it. The only way you can judiciously or precisely use image adjustment tools is if you can control to a granular level the parameters of the photo.
DeleteI'd disagree with you about all digital being ugly. I think that only holds if you are so used to film that the little imperfections are seen as normal. I think it's the same as when Peter Jackson decided to shoot The Hobbit in 48fps rather than 24p. We as a culture are so used to 24 frames per second that when something different (and technically better) appears, we see it as too distracting to enjoy the film. Think about it: *Almost* every major motion picture before that was shot at 24 frames per second, whereas the lower-budget films used higher frame rates because they shot on DV. We'e associated the low frame rate to high budget films.
The same (I think) is true when it comes to film vs digital in the photography world.
AHG! I had written a very long comment when I accidentally deleted it all.
DeleteGRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Excuse me while I drown myself.
Hate it when that happens.
DeleteBut I'd love to hear what you were going to say.
DeleteMaybe when I have an a spare hour or so.
DeleteOuch. You lost a lot.
DeleteDoes no one back up super long comments on Google Drive???
DeleteI think I'm going to wait until Sunday to tell you what I was writing here. To write the same sentences (approximately) over again would give me apoplexy. I could not stand the strain.
DeleteInstagram IS art. jk. No one said it is. But where else am I going to post my photos of my Converse?
ReplyDeleteu du not post pic uv ur converz insted obveeuzlee
DeleteFrankly I do not see why one would do that. But I am a self (though not exclusively self) described nerd and obviously am not in tune with the workings of a typical teenager's mind.
Maybe because NOBODY CARES ABOUT PICTURES OF YOUR NIKE-MADE SHOES THAT ARE IDENTICAL TO EVERY SINGLE ONE OF FIFTY BAZILLION OTHER CONVERSE SHOES. Sorry. Had to get that out, even almost three months later.
Delete