Changing Images
Modern Mrs. Darcy posted a wonderful essay a few weeks ago about how pictures have changed. Once you see the framing, you won’t be able to un-see it.
If you look at the pictures before the advent of social media, the composition looks one way. You’ll need to click over to see the examples. And then after social media, well, you’ll see the Instagramification of the framing. Again, once you see the examples, you’ll look back through your camera roll and notice the way you photograph food or people or places.
It’s fascinating, and I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. But there is an Instagram aesthetic, and even things not being posted to Instagram — I, for example, never post to Instagram but I can see this in my photographs, too — are impacted because we’re influenced by the framing that we see daily online.
It’s really interesting.
4 comments
Hmmm. I read the essay and I see what she means. I actually feel like I started taking photos differently when I started scrapbooking — reading the scrapbooking magazines & seeing what others were scrapbooking and the photos they were taking and how they were using their photos to tell a story. This was several years before social media.
I still take people photos (as well as objects — lots of sunsets! lol) — but I will admit I’ve been posting more photos of “things” vs people online lately, for a couple of reasons. 1) It’s just dh & me — we don’t have cute kids or grandkids to photograph & post, and there’s usually no one else around to post photos of the two of us. Dh doesn’t like to have his photo posted too often, and I don’t like posting umpteen selfies (although I do post the odd one). 2) I would like to post more photos of our great-niblings — but Little Great-Niece’s parents in particular don’t post many photos of her themselves. They’ve never asked me NOT to post photos, but I feel funny posting more photos of her than their parents & grandparents do. (I’m not quite as inhibited about photos of Little Great-Nephew, since his parents do post photos of him.) 3) SIL has asked me not to post photos from various family gatherings that her niece hasn’t been invited to, because the niece’s nose gets out of joint and it just causes unnecessary grief for SIL. Of course I abide by her wishes, but it’s sure frustrating and awkward. And 4) I have many people in my life who do not appreciate having their photos posted online — which limits the numbers and kinds of photos I can post. Sometimes sunsets and dinner plates are just safer subjects. 😉
Generally, I think it’s social media and people’s (dis)comfort with sharing and having photos shared on it that’s the problem, and not necessarily the photos we’re actually taking.
Oooh, my comment was becoming so long-winded that I’m going to have to make a separate post about it. Thanks for the inspiration!
It’s the difference between your own camera roll, taken for your pleasure/satisfaction/memories, and what you post on social media, isn’t it? Because the two don’t have to be the same. When they are, I think we have lost perspective. I don’t want photos of me or my husband all over social media. Yuck! But I’ll take them so we can keep them or frame them or include them in a photobook of travels. But we are never the highlight.
For me, the difference is less about pre/post-social media, but about film photography and digital photography. Suddenly, we could take as many photos as we wanted. That has changed the way I take photos, far more than social media.
I looked through my pictures after reading the article and it is true I do have a lot of pictures of food etc, but those are me sharing the moment immediately with people I text… prior to phones those are pictures that never would have been taken because the moment would have long passed. Similarly a lot of landscape kinds of things. And messes. Previously photos were taken to memorialize something, but now they’re more often taken to share something fleeting that I could never have shared before.
I rarely photograph food. I have tons of landscapes, which is kind of boring. I should cull some of them. But I remember when my friend and I went to Italy in the early 90s, we would make sure to stick our heads into every shot to prove we were there. It was hilarious. Then, I went to Ireland in the late 90s with some coworkers. We had an accidental photo of another coworker’s butt which became a sort of Flat Stanley adventure. Now I take pictures of the dogs and my daughter and some landscapes, but the majority of my camera roll is memes or screenshots. I also take pictures of things I find amusing in stores and send to whoever I think will also find them amusing.