Urban Dictionary definitions of Instagram

Every hipster's favourite way to make it look like they take really classy pictures when really they are still using their phones. Yeah, you might look really cute/old school/vintage/retro, but it's still a cell phone picture.

Photographer: Hey man, look at this picture I took with my Canon 5D Mark II camera and edited in Photoshop! 

Hipster: No way man, look at this picture that I took on my phone with Instagram! It's even better! 

Photographer: *FACEPALM*

Instagram: Pretentious, overused app that purchasing may cause feelings of hipster-ism, false sense of being artistic when taking mobile photos. When used with your mobile device, add grain, "vintage" filters, and corny Polaroid borders, with the upmost laziness. Hipster: Check my Instagram uploads to see multiple shitty pictures of my dog, and food with vintage filters. I consider myself to be a photographer and creative because I purchased an app that millions of other people use. Learn to manipulate photos on photoshop, lighting and ISO settings? Puh-lease. (Definitions available at: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Instagram)

The Selfie

A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see the person's arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell that this person does not have any friends to take picture of them so they resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a duck face or the individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.
(Definition available at: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=selfie)

(Image available at: http://www.cambio.com/2013/04/19/zayn-malik-and-perrie-edwards-selfies-zerrie-duck-face-pics-wedding-buzz-little-mix-video/)

Selfies seems to have quite a negative reputation, they certainly don't have a good reputation. It seems more of a jokey thing to do and if people on Facebook actually seem serious about their selfies most people seem to mock them.

Photographers using Instagram

Searching through Instagram can sometimes be a bore. A lot of the images on there seem to be the same, as I have stated in my earlier post "Some people seem to really hate Instagram". 
Creative Bloq wrote an article about 8 inspiring photographers to follow on Instagram. The "Instagrammers" they recommended seem to have a fresh take on the "typical" Instagram photos. 

Mike Kus

Dan Rubin

Darryll Jones

Marcus Rodriguez

Mark Hunter

Jane Samuels

Dustin Vaughn-Luma

Angeliki Jackson

(Images and whole article available at: http://www.creativebloq.com/photography/instagram-2131996)

Erik Kessels

Nowadays, family albums are very rare. Today you seem to find family photos online, on things such as Facebook and Flickr, instead of everyone keeping an album in their home. I feel this is a shame in some respects, there's something aesthetically pleasing about having a physical family album, with all its wear and tears. The images seem to hold more memories too, as they're once in a lifetime images, snapshots of a certain time in your life.   

Album Beauty, an exhibition of found photographs curated by Erik Kessels, is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album. Once commonplace in every home, the photo-album has been replaced by the digital age where images are now jpegs and live online and in hard drives. These visual narratives are testament to the once universal appeal to document and display the mundane. Often a repository for family history, they usually represent a manufactured family as edited for display. The albums speak of birth, death, beauty, sexuality, pride, happiness, youth, competition, exploration, complicity and friendship.

(Article and images available at: http://www.formatfestival.com/artists/erik-kessels)

The use of Social Networks.

Penelope Umbrico: Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, 2006-ongoing

This is a project I started when I found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the image hosting website, Flickr. I cropped just the suns from these pictures and uploaded them to Kodak, making 4" x 6" machine prints from them. 

For each installation, the title reflects the number of hits I got searching "sunset" on Flickr on the day I made/print the piece – for example, the title of the piece for the Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, was 2,303,057 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07 and for the New York Photo Festival it was 3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08 - the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities, and a reflection of the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there. I think it's peculiar that the sun, the quintessential life giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of warmth, optimism and vitamin D, and so universally photographed, finds expression on the internet, the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed electrical circuit. Looking into this cool electronic space one finds a virtual window onto the natural world.

Titles of installations to date:

2,303,057 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07
3,221,717 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08
4,064,589 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/02/08
4,109,500 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/09/08
4,786,139 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 1/14/09
5,009,279 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 2/20/09
5,083,088 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 3/06/09
5,332,272 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/22/09
5,377,183 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/28/09
5,537,594 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 5/30/09
5,858,631 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/26/09
5,911,253 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 8/03/09
6,069,633 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 8/27/09
7,626,056 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/17/10
7,707,250 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/30/10
8,146,774 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 10/15/10
8,309,719 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 11/20/10
8,313,619 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 11/21/10
8,730,221 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 02/20/10

(Artist statement available at: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/Suns/Suns_State.html)

(Image available at: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/Suns/Suns_Index.html)

But can this be classed as her own work?

Umbrico is taking other peoples images off Flickr and creating installation pieces. I suppose after reading her artist statement it's easier to understand her concept. It's not just about using other people's Flickr images but about how something so natural, like a sun, can be concealed in the likes of an online community.

Martin Parr's The Last Resort

After seeing Martin Parr’s iconic work shot in New Brighton, you can kind of see the desired effect that people want to recreate in the digital age. His work is very saturated and spontaneously natural. 

(Image available at: http://blog.zeit.de/fotoblog/2010/01/25/martin-parr-the-last-resort/)

(Image available at: http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/the-last-resort-martin-parr/)

Even though Parr's images have very in depth meanings about the British working class and can been seen as very controversial, on the surface, the colours and saturation in images can be seen as very aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I feel this is why Instagram, Hipstamatic and other apps alike can create images which could be seen as mode of "photography" because you can closely recreate a similar feel in your own images as Parr created in his, using just a mobile phone camera. I am in no way saying that there is a close comparison between an Instagram photo and the work of Martin Parr but you can see how people aspire to create images with a similar feel.

Martin Parr seems to be all about the snap shot and Instagram seems to essentially be all about the same thing. It just gives you the chance to share your snap shots with an online community and also tweak your images slightly with the use of correct exposure button and several filters.

 (own image)

(own image)

Some people seem to really hate Instagram.

Many a times I have scrolled through Facebook and seen people complaining about Instagram, whether it be about people's over use of hastags or over edited images. I'm all for Instagram but sometimes scrolling through my feeds, everything looks a bit too cliché or the same. Pictures of what you had for lunch, your newly painted nails, a picture of the sky line, your pet, what's going on with the British bipolar weather or you new "selfie" in the bathroom mirror.