Photographers After Social Media

We’re currently witnessing the death throes of social media. As is always the case when something monstrous dies, it’s not a pretty sight. None of it would matter much, though, if social media did not have the power to drag along liberal democracy into the abyss.

As photographers, we’re all citizens of some country. Thus, at least in theory we have an interest in improving our general life conditions. I have opinions about what this might look like both for our work and for how we approach social media. However, here I want to focus on social media not as the symptom of a larger disease (which they still are) but as a tool (which they were).

This morning, I was thinking that there probably are photographers who have never known a world in which social media do not play a large role. But there was such a world, and it existed not that long ago. In fact, you don’t have to go back that far in time to arrive in a world in which it was very difficult to find meaningful information and/or resources about photography online.

For sure, I do not want to glamourize the pre-social-media online world. My first exposure to the internet was in the early 1990s. Already then it was relatively easy to find the kinds of things that have now been vastly amplified by social media: trolling, bad-faith arguments for their own sakes, etc. As far as I can tell, the competition between people’s best interests and their worst has always existed online.

Furthermore, as I already noted unlike now it was very difficult to easily come across photography online for a long time. When I first began developing this website/blog, I started out with the idea of creating a resource for people that would make looking for photography a lot easier. Where photography existed online, it was dispersed, and finding it was difficult and cumbersome.

At some stage into what was then Conscientious I disabled comments.

There have always been a lot of noises from bad-faith actors about “free speech”. I disabled comments mostly because I realized that I would not be able to leave them unattended, given the increasing flood of trolling and bot-controlled spam. However, I did not have the time to do so. I also decided that that was not the best investment of my time. Instead of moderating comments, I wanted to spend my energies on creating things.

Initially, social media seemed like a great tool for photographers because they solved one of the big problems with blogs: they turbo-charged the advantages of blogging while at least initially removing some of its drawbacks. Creating a site to share and entering a community was a lot easier and much more convenient. That’s why blogging faded into the background very quickly.

The new tool seemed just so much more convenient and so much easier than the old one. If I had not invested so much time into my blog I might have jumped to social media as well. But there was one aspect I did not trust: you had (and have) no control over the general environment you’re in.

I had seen this basic fact create massive problems before, and I did not want it to create problems for me. That’s why the main focus of my work has always been this site, even as I have been active on a variety of different social-media platforms.

It’s difficult to remember or imagine this now, but social-media platforms used to be fun. I personally always thought that Facebook was creepy, so after some brief tests I stayed away from it. Twitter was a lot of fun for a while, and so was Instagram. You could use Twitter to see people share the wittiest short pieces of text, and on Instagram you would find a stream of photographs (and only that: no ads, no recycled video clips).

While this was more than enough for its users, it was not enough for the people in the background, the people running the sites. The form of capitalism we live under decrees that only growth is good. Consequently, social-media platforms had to grow. How do you grow something that is fun? Why, of course you make it more fun!

The only problem with this idea is that the people who had set up the platforms were (and still are) intellectually and morally not very well suited for this endeavour. They embraced the simplest idea they could find — let’s give people more of what we think they want, and they ran with it: enter what we now call “the algorithm”.

“Engagement” was amplified, which only meant: trolls and bad-faith actors were given an advantage. It didn’t matter what or how people engaged. If you were a quiet, thoughtful voice: tough luck! Social Media sites became the equivalent of ancient Rome’s Circus Maximus. Foreign bad-faith actors (Vladimir Putin and others) immediately stepped in because they knew they could massively harm the liberal democracies they despise so much.

Calling people’s decisions “the algorithm” was a nifty choice. It makes it seem as if there were an independent sentient entity behind what is happening, instead of the cold, hard decisions by a group of mostly white males with their incredibly narrow mindsets.

But you want to keep this in mind (especially now that the snake oil of “AI” has arrived): the algorithm is meaningless. It’s a set of rules a computer operates with. The only thing that matters are the rules and in particular the people who set them.

Making sure that people had “more fun” resulted in, for example, Instagram turning from what was a convenient and fun photo-sharing platform into whatever it is now. I don’t even know how to describe it other than maybe an advertizing platform that consists of previously incompatible pieces created by plundering other platform’s ideas.

It’s not even so much the fact that Instagram is overrun by things most photographers did not really sign up for. It’s that what you get to see and what is not allowed to be seen is decreed by those people in Silicon Valley.

And there has been yet another change. Wearing a watch that retails at $895,500, Mark Zuckerberg, the man who started out with a website to rate women’s bodies (to later enable genocide at least once) announced that there would be changes to the rules yet again. In light of the outcome of the 2024 US election, Zuckerberg announced that he would follow Elon Musk’s lead.

Musk, a far-right troll who happens to be the richest person in the world, had earlier bought Twitter and quickly transformed it into the equivalent of a Nazi bar (the site is now called “X”, probably because using a swastika would have been too on the nose).

As I noted, bad faith and trolling have always existed on the internet. But these man-children have made it one of the drivers of their business models (“engagement”). Their bet is that people will not quit their platforms because they have become indispensable.

Of course, nobody is actually forced to use any of those platforms. Much like a lot of people, I quit Twitter shortly after Musk’s takeover. I’m currently thinking about what to do with Instagram.

So what do you do with Instagram? As far as I’m concerned, the site has long lost its utility as a photography sharing platform. It has become very rare for me to discover anything new or interesting there even though I spend way too much time scrolling there (I mostly look for content around learning Japanese, and I will happily admit that I love looking at animal videos).

But Instagram is the only game in town. Or rather, it feels as if it were. The reality is that while there are a number of photo-sharing apps, only Instagram comes with a legacy community. In almost all of the conversations I have either been a part of or that I have seen, that factor has popped up in some form or another: “XXX looks great, but there’s not much happening there.” (Replace “XXX” with whatever photograph app you can think of.)

Simply speaking, looking for a replacement for Instagram but expecting that it operates at the level of that site simply is unrealistic. That’s not how the world works. You can build up things pretty quickly, though. Just have a look at how quickly Bluesky has replaced Twitter for a lot of people.

It might just come to down to what G. Willow Wilson observed there the other day: “I honestly think we are experiencing the end of the internet as those of us born in the 20th c understand it. Smaller, siloed communities like discord servers and newsletters will persist, but the idea of the global public square is dead, as is “the information superhighway.” VCs killed it.”

Unlike the time when social media started, I believe this presents an opportunity for photographers today. Creating a new community on a different platform will take time and effort. In fact, it’s not even clear to me that focusing on only one app is the approach to follow: maybe app XXX works better for sharing work, while app YYY might be better for people who want to engage in conversations?

The opportunity presented by the agonizing demise of Instagram for photographers is the following: the creation of something new can now be done knowing all the things that went wrong with Instagram.

You can see exactly that process happening for the Twitter alternatives. It’s not an easy process, but as far as I can tell, people are a lot more mindful of what they want and need — and what they don’t want and need.

Consequently, I believe that photographers’ interests in photo-sharing apps should go beyond having something that (unlike Instagram) works for them. Instead, photographers need to spend a little bit of time thinking about what exactly they need. Those photo-sharing apps are tools. You base the tool you pick on what you need it for.

Furthermore, also be mindful of all the photographers who were not active on Instagram because of the incessant censorship there. They’re predominantly women, people of colour, members of the LGBTQI community. If you feel bad about losing what you built, simply try to imagine being in their position: they have always been in that position. Being able to build something new that includes what the man-children excluded is a huge opportunity for all of us.

I don’t know about you, but being on Instagram and seeing it distort itself into the monster that’s detrimental to everybody’s mental health has been excruciating. At the same time, the death of Instagram should not be seen as the death of the underlying idea. Trust me, I don’t think we want to go back to the world that existed twenty years ago, where it was so much harder to interact with other photographers and their work.

And without community, we will not be able to deal with the many challenges we’re facing today. Without community and solidarity, we will be passive spectators to the destruction of liberal democracies by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Even if you feel that you need a haven from all that craziness, making yourself a member of a community indirectly is contributing to the very larger good that is now being plundered by the oligarchs.

The promise of the social internet has been betrayed; but it has not disappeared. The promise of an internet that is uniquely designed to use photography has been distorted; but it also has not disappeared.

The death of Instagram is not the death of photo sharing online. It’s merely the death of a particular, heavily distorted form.

It is upon us individually to make good use of what still is available and to create something meaningful from it. On the internet, this has happened before, and it can happen again.

(I will share some more specific ideas on some of my past experiences and how they influence how I will move forward on my Patreon.)

I have never been particularly interested in street photography. Of course, I am aware of its dominant past practitioners. Their work speaks of a certain moment in time (and space: mostly New York City) that has long passed. I find it difficult to ignore the very strong whiff of machismo around those photographs.

Street photography today mostly reminds me of what reenactors do: instead of donning some old uniform to re-stage some battle (let’s not get into the baggage of that), you put a camera around your neck and re-imagine the glory days of the photographic discipline you admire so much. It’s fine if that’s your thing: who am I to argue with that?

Except that today, many (most?) people do not want to be photographed without their consent. The US defense of the public space in which you operate and that gives you the legal right to do so does not address the ethics of it. The European Union has stricter laws and protects its citizens’ right of their own pictures. There are legal exceptions for artists (that differ from country to country), but the ethical aspect remains.

Of course, what defines an artist is not that they do what they want to do. The defining criterion of a real artist is that they create something around and against the restrictions they find themselves facing.

The following is a relevant and important question not just for street photographers but for many other practitioners as well: how do you create a form of whatever type of photography you’re using that does not merely reproduce simulacra of bygone eras? The idea is not to create the new for the sake of the new (in a neoliberal, consumerist sense), but instead to create the new for the sake of it speaking to the moment artists are finding themselves in?

Maybe it is no surprise that one possible answer for street photography would come from Japan. Tokyo, after all, has been undergoing changes since, say, the 1960s that are a lot more massive than the ones you’d be able to observe in New York City, both in terms of what the built environment looks like and the overall embrace of technology and public investments into civic infrastructure. At the same time, consumerism plays an outsized role in both cities.

What might a street photography look like that accounts for all of these massive changes and that brings the genre into our own time? If you’re curious, Fumitsugu Takedo will show you in his book Ambience Decay (the artist’s website is almost entirely in Japanese, but there is enough English text for a viewer to understand what’s going on).

I can’t tell whether the book was produced using a mass-market printing service (some equivalent of Mixam). For most photography applications that I can think of such services don’t do a particular good job. But here, the production matches the world presented in the book really well. I have seen my fair share of books produced this way, and I’ve always come across being underwhelmed. Not here.

One of the defining aspects of Ambience Decay is not only an embrace of different types of images and image sources, it’s also its rejection of old-fashioned ideas of image quality. By that I mean that blown up details of digital images (that might or might not betray compression artifacts, screen-raster details, or gaudy overly processed colours) exist next straight photographs of a mostly completely helter-skelter kind.

Looking through the book, I was immediately transported back to the busiest and most crowded sections of Tokyo, with its throngs of people on their ways to whatever destinations they were heading towards. The whole book is filled with the city’s nervous energy.

Interestingly, the most prominent aspects of the book are hands, many of them holding and/or operating smartphones. It’s the hands of people encountered in the streets. There barely are any depictions of them following the tradition of the genre. Instead, they’re lost in the urban jumble around them, cut off through the cameras’ framings, obscured by ubiquitous reflections created by store windows and the displays of advertizing.

If traditional street photography portrayed life through its skillfully seen temporary arrangements of individuals navigating their city, here the city has overcome its own inhabitants. Whatever individuality the people in the photographs might have within the confines of their own homes, there is nothing left in an environment that not only culturally negates the individual: capitalism, despite its hollow promise of iThis and iThat, does so as well.

We have all become expendable, and nothing but the content of our bank accounts is of interest.

I find it unlikely that the practitioners of traditional street photography will recognize a contemporary version of their beloved genre in this book (I could be mistaken). But for the rest of us, Ambience Decay demonstrates that as a medium, photography can be driven forward and brought into this moment — not through snake-oil style offerings coming out of Silicon Valley (such as “AI” image making) but through the ingenuity of its practitioners.

There is a lesson here, even though I do not want to overstate the case: if you believe that you will create good art by seeing which prompts will deliver you the best images, you might be operating under the wrongest possible definition of what art is. Operating within the confines of a box is not what makes good art (and that’s not even getting into the many deeply problematic aspects of “AI” image making, such as the plundering of visual resources and the many biases against people who are not straight and white).

Good art that pushes the boundaries and that drives its own media forward is made by operating outside of the confines of the boxes, whether the ones created by the technology available to you or the ones created by whatever society you might find yourself living in.

To reinvent the moribund genre of street photography by bringing it into our time, both in terms of image making and looking, is no mean feat. But here it is, Fumitsugu Takedo‘s new street photography, produced in sterile consumerist Tokyo.

Highly recommended.

Ambience Decay; images by Fumitsugu Takedo; 120 pages; Photobook Daydream Editions, 2024

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