Going Back to Move Forward

NOTE: To see the photos that I reference in this episode, see the post on my Substack.

On one of our recent morning walk and talks, a group of photographers and I were talking about how much worse Instagram has gotten over the past few years in terms of exposure and engagement. We all agreed that it seems like most photographers we’ve spoken to about it have very similar feedback. Subscribers, reach, and engagement are all a fraction of what they used to be. And the platform that was once all about sharing images no longer seems to care about images at all — instead they prioritize short-form video in a desperate attempt to compete with TikTok and YouTube. But in the process, I think the platform has lost its way and has just become a vapid mechanism to spoon-feed ads to users. To be clear, there are still a bunch of terrific artists and photographers on Instagram — which is the main reason I haven’t left — but that’s not what gets served up to me by the algorithm. Even the people I follow are in my feed less and less, which makes very little sense to me. I’ve told you “this is the work I’m interested in” and yet that’s not what you give me. So the whole experience just keeps getting more and more disappointing — and we haven’t even talked about the “Tech Bro” leadership, which is a whole other thing.

One of the photographers in the conversation asked whether I’d tried Flickr as an alternative. I told him that I used to be pretty active on Flickr — especially when I was still teaching Photoshop — but honestly, I don’t think I’ve logged in since 2017 or 2018 when SmugMug bought the platform. I said that I’d really been enjoying the upswing in artists and photographers on Substack so I hadn’t really considered other alternatives, especially one that in my mind had been all but dead for years. Still, he encouraged me to give it a look and later that afternoon, I was kind of amazed to see that my old login credentials still worked. The homepage feed looks different than I remember it, which is probably a good thing. What surprised me the most is that when I clicked on “Photostream” in the “You” dropdown, I still had more than 300 photos that I was sure I had deleted, but I’m so glad that I didn’t. It was amazing to see some of the things that I was focusing on from 2007-2011. Most of the photos are of architectural details, which I still love to photograph, but many of my photos from that time are street portraits and I remember the stories around every one of them.

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