How quitting social media changed my photography
When I stopped posting, I started seeing. It has been a year and a half since I deleted my social media accounts and I’d now like to share how it has impacted my approach to photography and other artistic endeavours. It has been an eye-opening personal transformation that has helped me to take back my creative freedom.
Reclaiming your artistic autonomy
If you’re using social media, you might not even realise how much it is directing your photography. 99% of people are not, in fact, doing photography, but trying to produce content. There is a big difference. When you stop using social media, there is no more pressure to produce content. Instead, you’re making art on your terms again.
Slower pace
Posting on social media is not all about quality, but perhaps even more importantly, quantity. Obviously, that’s why a huge amount of content is trash. Algorithms tend to favour regular and rapid posting and it creates pressure to keep producing content faster than might feel natural for you. Quite typically, you end up sacrificing quality over quantity.
I personally really, really like to take my time with photography. When I stopped using social media, I was able to let go of that machine gun mentality. There simply is no need to be hasty anymore.
Side note from a film photographer’s perspective
The old adage goes that film photography slows you down, and as an avid film shooter myself, I have to agree with that. So isn’t there a bit of a dissonance if you prefer to slow down, but the publishing platform (social media) keeps demanding a rapid pace of posting? It creates this “Oh my goodness, I’m running out of things to post” feeling.
I actually think I’m one of the slowest photographer in the world. It takes me an absolute eternity to finish a single roll of 36 exposure film. Even something like 12 shots on medium format is a struggle, because I like to take my time. I don’t want to end up developing a roll of film, containing images that were shot in a hurry, only to have something to post.
No need for repetition
So because you’re constantly running out of content and ideas, you end up posting the same things over and over again. Algorithms favour consistency too, which further locks users into repetition mode, even if it stops satisfying the actual creative need and may actually cause legit anxiety and creative crisis. Leaving social media frees you from these chains and allows you to be as experimental and as inconsistent as you need to be.
There is no need for you to become a walking xerox-machine. Artists need to be curious and to explore. If an algorithm molds your brain into thinking that your work must always align perfectly with your most successful post, you’re not going to be able to think creatively anymore and you’re just trying to replicate your previous success.
Believe it or not, you CAN still be consistent, if that is something that you truly desire, AND to be experimental at the same time. You don’t need to be all over the place necessarily, even though I don’t see a problem with it either. If you want to improve your art, it can be iterated step by step via experimentation, yielding a progressive evolution, adding one or two new creative insights, using the previous work as a growing platform. A growth like that is an upward spiral, but an algorithm dictated social media rut is just like going around in circles.
Once you break free from that repetition, a new kind of experimentation becomes possible. Free experimentation and alternation in your work will help you to make new connections and associations between things, that are harder to come by when repeating the same things over and over again. A new perspective might be seen after circulating between different projects and art forms. Returning to the previous one might be seen in a different light after returning to it after working on something else, completely different for a while. It gives your mind some much needed rest and allows new ideas to form naturally, like aging wine in a barrel.
Endless repetition gives you a creative tunnel vision. You’re teaching your brain to see subjects through the social media lens, causing you to miss out on other creative opportunities. So let’s say you’re on a photo walk. You’re scouting for subjects, looking around for things to photograph. Looking through the social media lens, allows you only to see subjects and motifs that aligns with your social media brand, filtering out a huge amount of other possibilities, that you would be able to detect if you weren’t looking for content, but ways to truly express yourself instead.
This certainly happened to me and I’m not photographing anymore in order to meet audience’s expectations. Giving up an audience altogether might seem like a frightening trade-off, but the pay-off is actually much greater. You’re given a much deeper and personal artistic outlet in return, that is infinitely more rewarding and satisfying than few superficial likes or generic, hollow comments.
Unique expression (content creation vs. making art)
Now that you’re making art for yourself again, you’re not anymore influenced by… well… influencers. Or any other social media trend either. When you’re inside the social media bubble, it is hard to see what is happening on the other side. Once you break the bubble, you’ll SEE just how blinded you were before. An entire new, creative world will unfold in front of your eyes.
Whether you realise it or not, you’re taking a huge amount of influences from other users. I find it hard to believe that even consciously copying other people’s ideas is actually encouraged these days. It is a part of the social media game that I just don’t understand. I sort of get the idea of taking part in trends, in order to feel a sense of belonging and community, but to shamelessly copy other people’s ideas is not a way to go for a creative person.
If you consider yourself just a content creator, that’s a different thing and fine, I guess, but artists do have deeper needs than that.
As a bottom line, I’m concluding that leaving social media didn’t make me less visible, it just made my art more alive.
