Are you a photographer or a one trick pony?
It is one thing to have a point of view rather than a repetitive fixation. I can see the point of sticking with a certain theme in order to master a craft because it provides consistency and predictability in the eyes of the audience (i.e. Instagram followers) but more often than not, or at least very easily, it will render the photographer into a one trick pony, who keeps doing the same thing over and over again, causing an inflation of artistic expression.
Being able to let go of mannerisms and changing direction according to one’s true visions and artistic ambition seems more honest and fulfilling approach than reducing oneself into a human xerox-machine, but especially now, during the social media age, we are worried about losing Instagram followers if we appear to switch from one niche to another. As a driver for artistic philosophy it seems somehow wrong and dishonest, but I suppose we all want the attention thus allowing algorithms, instead of our own expressive needs, to dictate us.
At one point I had a strong focus on nature and outdoors and it was a hugely popular theme for Instagram. It was also the golden age of organic growth and I gained a nice bit of following. After a while my focus shifted towards street photography and then into portraiture. Every change of direction caused the audience to lose interest and it always manifested in the drop of follower count. Of course it makes sense. I typically too start to follow a person for one particular thing and lose interest more easily if the topic changes over time into something else than I was initially into. Not always, but this is the essence of it and for many photographers this becomes scary, because we tend to measure our success via numbers instead of our own values.
Last week I wrote about consistency and sort of challenged the idea of it. What is consistency? In Instagram terms it is of course something very superficial and obvious and it would be perhaps a bit too optimistic to expect that an Instagram audience as a collective intellect, would be able to detect a common thread like poverty of loneliness if it would be executed by using five different photography techniques. An average instagrammer would not be able to detect what connects the images thematically if one set of photos were taken on polaroids, the other with B/W 35mm, third with iPhone and so on. In instagram terms, consistency means that the author only uses the same filters or only shoots gas stations on Cinestill 800 — something blatantly obvious, that does not challenge the visual literacy in any way. And let’s not even start with Instarepeat.
But let’s not forget that even though Instagram is a visual platform, it is actually a horrible outlet for a photographer. It is good for an instagrammer, which isn’t the same thing. These days Instagram is a pretty distant memory of what it once was, because it is becoming more and more a tool for the so called influencers. I think Instagram falls into the category of nice-to-have things, but other than that it is actually pretty irrelevant to photography and not anything to seriously stress over about.
