Photography is in essence a conversation between you and the world, not you and an audience. There is a reason why it’s not a public activity, even if you take into account photo walks. The moment you photograph for likes on social media instead of for personal motivation, your photography become predictable, safe, bland.
The likes, the approval system of social media, applies pressure to your photography and whatever the platform, it changes how you photograph, and even why you do it.
The purpose of social media platforms is to provide to the largest numbers what they want to see. The like button is nothing more than a conformity detector. It’s a levelling of content by the average. The social group doesn’t tolerate real individuality because individuality threatens the social contract holding it together. You either conform to the algorithmic choices, and they’re often very obscure on purpose, or your content will disappear from the screens.
Think about what would happen today if some of the most famous photographers dared posting their photograph objects on the social media of their times: Eggleston’s colour work would be dismissed as amateur and frivolous; Stephen Shore’s mundane photography would be canned as boring and uninteresting (what he was told at the time) and would never make it to the Instagram feeds; Atget’s documentary Paris street photographs would be labelled lacking in human interest and of no interest to anyone, whereas we find these photos of disappeared streets fascinating. These photographers succeeded precisely because they ignored what was popular and what would get them noticed. We wouldn’t know about them if they had produced middle of the road work but Instagram-popular work.
The internet has turned creativity into a constant referendum where strangers decide if your photography is worth their time or not. And that time is usually minimal. Maybe a few seconds at best for the most striking of them.
We’re told that the only worthy benchmark is virality. That nothing is more important than producing an image that goes viral for a day. But good photographs come from extended periods of thinking, from following hunches that make no sense to anyone else, from pursuing ideas that might go nowhere. When you’re constantly performing for an audience, when your only aim is virality, seeing clearly becomes impossible and nonsensical. Everything you do is done through an internalisation of strangers’ eyes, through the taste of people you’ll never meet.
I started photography before social media existed. For me, the camera was a private laboratory. I could spend months on ideas with no obvious appeal to anyone (I can’t even count how many photos I have of Aberdeen beach, most likely in the tens of thousands; nobody would care about them). I could exhaust my own curiosity, before worrying about anyone else’s opinion. The point was to be free to experiment and find what I had to say (which can change over time). For me, that bedrock has appeared first, before it got into contact with social media. I feel for the younger generations who have grown up with social media pressure, with the incentive to perform all day, no matter what they do.
That process is the only way to can develop your voice or your style. It’s not something you do by trying to infer the rules of an algorithm to satisfy it.
When you finally share your work, if you decide to do so and there is certainly no obligation, I don’t share much of mine, you’ll be told it doesn’t please most people, that it has no commercial viability, that it lacks human interest, and that nobody was demanding it. If you have worked for your own reasons, if you’ve thought carefully about what you’re making and why, those objections won’t stick.
The photographers that have left their marks didn’t seek permission too see differently. They just did it, in some cases against the advice they were given against critiques (read the comments on Stephen Shore’s first exhibition). Validation from strangers isn’t just unnecessary, it’s actively corrosive because it substitutes someone else’s measure of success for your own judgement.
Check your engagement metrics if you want, but know they’re measuring conformity, not quality. The conversation that really matters is the one between you, your camera, and the world you’re trying to understand.
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