You posted a photograph a few hours ago and against your better judgment you log in to check up on it. You ask the photograph how it is doing. It says, "I'm exactly as well as the last time you saw me," but the like tally tells a different story. The number next to the red heart says it is sickly, anemic. You begin to question your very eyes, your judgment, your next post, maybe even the next shutter push.
Every photographer with an account has had an experience similar to this one. It's a kind of loneliness that can only be experienced in a crowd. There are millions of people here, but only 50 like me.
The bargain
The benefits of social media are not hard to understand, and often they are even real. A photographer in a small town can now find the six other people on earth restoring the same folding camera. A builder with a crazy idea no investor takes seriously can find funding for their project overnight. Photobooks get published that otherwise would never see the light of day, workshops fill, clients arrive, and someone shooting their first roll of Tri-X can watch a stranger's developing tutorial and make thirty six negatives. It’s even fair to say that some part of film photography's current health is owed to it.
The price of admission, however, is an invisible layer of extraction which one feels subconsciously. The photograph must first become a post, which is to say it must enter an attention market with its own rules of exchange. A post exists to be seen briefly, among other posts, in a flat world where the only accommodation is a Procrustean bed. It competes with breakfast, a cousin's wedding, an advertisement, the sidewalk, all inside the same scrolling column, all judged at a whispering distance.
When someone opened a daguerreotype case and peered into the eyes of a lost loved one, it was a moment that existed, however briefly, outside of the usual flow of time. But as we all know, when the platform is free you are the product. Social media is not actually hostile to photography, it is simply indifferent to it. Commerce, not art, is its purpose.
The scoreboard
The interface that drives the market resulting from this transformational process is a visible quantification: likes, saves, shares, comments, follows. It is similar to how the entertainment industry moved from evaluating quality to counting box office. How good is that movie? The consensus is bad. It “only” did 18 million last weekend.
But most photographers are very much concerned with quality. We obsess over how a lens renders, the subtleties of color interaction, and the amount of shadow detail that best suits the desired mood. Instead we must fight with the legibility of an image at two inches wide, and the ease with which it can be understood within a second. Some fine photographs score well on those terms. Many do not, and never could. Quiet pictures, difficult pictures, pictures that only work in a sequence, pictures that need to be big or ones that need to be contact printed.
Worse is when you start to think of, and evaluate, your own work or artistic development based on the criteria used on social media, which was not designed for that purpose. Then the medium you had intended to be a mechanism to drive people to your work takes over the steering wheel and drives you instead.
The mimetic loop
Photographers have always learned by copying other photographers. Art apprenticeship is as old as art itself. What the platforms change is the speed of the feedback loop and its reward system. When every photographer can see, in real time, exactly which images the market is paying for, the rational move is to make more of those images, and they do. Novelty becomes a compulsive imperative which begins to distort and bend everything to its will. Individual vision is abandoned and entire visual territories converge.
But there is also a bad side. The social media environment becomes a kind of simulated reality with its own set of rules which on the surface appear dynamic and in a state of constant flux. But underneath an obsessive hierarchy takes root. Influencers emerge and encourage mimetic competition. The views and likes grow to dizzying heights until that individual's appeal wanes. Then they are sacrificed to the social media gods, where then their double emerges from the ashes to begin the cycle anew.
Most serious artists and photographers make work in an attempt to understand the complexities of our experience and communicate that insight to an audience, not to enter a smaller, more obsessive simulation of the world and for our efforts to be altered, swallowed, or distorted by the simulation.
External and internal goods
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre drew a distinction in his book After Virtue that photographers might find useful. A practice, he argued, offers two kinds of goods. External goods are the rewards that attach to success from outside: money, status, recognition, opportunity. They are real, they are scarce, and they can in principle be won without fully embracing the practice itself. Internal goods are different. They can only be had by doing the thing, and they are the reason the thing is worth doing at all in the first place.
One of my favorite photography aphorisms is that the camera looks in both directions. It can reveal things about us that we may not be aware of. How we frame an image, the selection process itself, which is often done without conscious effort reveals many things about our interests, proclivities, priorities. The camera is a tool to understand the self.
When photography becomes a practice it draws even more from us. If we spent time to improve our craft, we grow through our efforts. When we learn to read our photos and become more selective in what we photograph, we learn to see more clearly. When we focus on what is important to use and photograph subjects that speak to issues that our central to our being, we learn judgment.
External goods – likes, followers, invitations, and sales – are also worthwhile pursuits and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. They require professionalism, fastidiousness, commitment. The point of making the observation is not to demonize one side but simply to observe that they are two separate things and one is not a replacement for the other. In fact, one depends on the other.
Using it without being used
None of this ends in a fit of rage where you delete your account. The argument here is much more modest. External goods are not the only measure of success. They have obvious benefits and the rent must be paid, but external goods do not exhaust the benefits of pursuing photography.
Social media can be made to work for you when you manage it wisely. Make the work before thinking about the post. Separate editing from sharing. Do not accept likes as critique. They are taps on a screen. Find two or three people whose eyes you trust and trade honest review. A single sentence from one of them outweighs a thousand impressions, because you learn from the photograph not its circulation.
But these are merely suggestions. There is a myriad of ways to find the right balance of social media use. Trust yourself. Socrates claimed he had a daimon who gave him warning signs to prevent him from making wrong decisions, a protector of internal goods, if you will. That is the voice that guides you when you make a photograph that you love and are proud of. Keep that close and in focus so you can always find your way back home.
GP