The Cloak of Invisibility
I was going to finish writing the following to publish it on CPhMag.com. But then I had second thoughts: I don’t actually want to waste more space on my site with Instagram. So instead, it’ll simply be an email.
Before I deleted my Instagram account, I did that one experiment that I couldn't really have done before: I unfollowed all the accounts that the algorithm would show me. I did this over the course of a few days. Every day, a few more would go. Given that I had been following over 1,000 people, I suspected that the algorithm would not run out of new material for me (of course, I didn't know how many of the accounts I followed were active).
My main motivation for remaining on Instagram despite my many misgivings had been to discover new work. That wasn't really happening to the extent that I thought would be possible. Was there not enough new work to discover? Or was I going about it the wrong way (I was attempting to cast as widely a net as I could imagine)?
I remember how on days where I had spent too much time scrolling through IG (ugh!), the app had actually told me that there was nothing else to see. I mostly didn’t believe it, but there was no way for me to prove that it was wrong.
For a few days, my removal of accounts mostly resulted in no difference other than seeing even more ads. But then something curious happened. Suddenly, I would encounter a really interesting account, some work I hadn't seen before. In all of those cases, those were accounts I had already been following (for some, I didn't even remember doing so). The longer I went on with my experiment, the more the experience on Instagram transformed.
On 31 January, I finally deleted my account. The experiment had come to an end: I had reached enough disgust with the people behind Instagram that I did not want to subject myself to the site any longer. They had been hiding the vast majority of the accounts I had expressly wanted to see from me.
On Bluesky, Rob Hornstra confirmed the outcome of my experiment, as did Donald Weber.
I think we all are aware of the fact that our experience with Instagram is (or in my case was) limited. I'm not sure, though, whether we truly understand the extent of those limitations. After all, the people who do -- the artists censored there and/or driven away -- are invisible to those inside the "community". And as I learned even a lot of the people you do follow remain invisible for you.
The German epic Nibelungenlied (made [in]famous by Richard Wagner) features a Tarnkappe or Cloak of Invisibility (I like the German term better because of its sound). I've always been fascinated by the idea, namely that you put on some hat or cloak, and then you become invisible (not surprisingly, today's military is very interested).
But that's not how this world works. In this world, you don't get to decide whether you're visible or invisible -- it's others who will do it for you, whether you like it or not. In the world of Instagram, it's the people who decide what the algorithms should do (never think of "the algorithm" as some sort of sentient, independent being -- it's only doing what actual people want it to do).
As it turned in my experiment, that Tarnkappe is not only thrown over anyone who falls short of the vaguely defined "community guidelines" (after Mark Zuckerberg's MAGA embrace, it became very clear who the people are for whom those "guidelines" are being enforced). It's also thrown over any number of people whose work and/or account a user has decided to see.
After I wrote about my decision to leave Instagram on this Mailing List, a photographer wrote back and noted how they were afraid of losing access to a community. I think that's maybe one of the most insidious aspects of the site: even as it's very clear and obvious how limited and limiting the community is, Instagram still manages to maintain the idea in its users that there is a community. But if there is such a community, it's small and it’s not one the site's users have any control over.
I wouldn't get so worked up about Instagram if it weren't for the fact that the one initial idea that drove me into blogging was (and still is) to contribute to people's ability to see and discover photography. So when a site that pretends to do that in fact does the complete opposite, I find that offensive.
As I said, I was fully aware of the problems with Instagram before (I wrote about its censorship years ago; also note this article). Now that it’s in my past, I can spend my time and energy on trying to build a real community (I don’t know what form this might take) and on re-focusing my thinking on helping make photography visible. The idea of the cloak of invisibility isn’t new: in the past, people would talk about gatekeepers. Even if some of those discussions are populist and unrelated to the actual reality of how photoland operates, others are very much real.
With CPhMag.com I’ve been trying for years to cast a wider net. It isn’t always easy. For example, at the end of last year, I didn’t have a single photobook by a woman photographer available for review, while there was a stack of books by men (there’s a discussion to be had about how skewed the field of photobook publishing is towards men). Luckily, with time and effort (and some money) I managed to solve that problem. And even though I know that Instagram did not help me find more work to showcase, the thought of it still lingers. I will get it out of my system, no doubt. But I don’t like the amount of time it takes.
In any case, even though the general ecosphere of photography online has become a lot more lively since I first started blogging, I do think that social media have managed to revert a lot of the progress we had made during the heydays of blogging. I hope that some of the energy that was destroyed by social media will come back; what forms it might take I don’t know.
And that’s really enough with the Instagram nonsense, isn’t it? Yes, it is. I’m not going to spend more time on it. I promise that the next email will be back with what you probably signed up for: a selection of random, eclectic material to enjoy.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg