Beating Instagram At Their Own Game
In which I talk about my own anti-Instagram, about a few books I made between 2012 and 2015, and about a nonlinear novel I'm reading right now
A few weeks into the pandemic, I had an idea. With everybody being isolated, I thought that there would have to be a way to do something with pictures that would break that isolation. What if, I wondered, if I send people pictures in the mail: actual physical pictures?
In a nutshell, I wanted to take everything that’s good about Instagram and remove everything that’s so terrible about it (at this stage, the terrible parts vastly outweigh the good bits).
Instagram is all about pictures, and one’s followers — or “disciples”as Moira Rose from Schitt$ Creek calls them — get to see them, as long as the underlying algorithm will allow this. The opposite of posting pictures into the endless void that is Instagram is to send a physical picture, a print, to a single person. That person for sure will see the picture (as long as the US post office will deliver the mail, which isn’t a given any longer since the Trump administration crippled it to rig the upcoming election).
There’s no way to check for a “like” (not even to mention there’s no possible multiplicity of it). The picture is just gone: it goes to that one person that I picked it for. At times, there will be a response in the mail, often with a picture included.
Before writing this email, I checked my phone to see whether I had saved any photographs of the pictures I already sent out. There was only one. I had planned to take a picture each time. But now I’m glad that I didn’t do that, because I ended up disliking that I even had that one picture. I deleted it.
I will keep going with this (so far, nobody has complained about getting a picture in the mail).
I was looking for some photobook in my office, and while digging through the piles of books I came across a series of books I made eight to five years ago. I remember that at some stage, a couple of years after I started teaching, I gave myself the assignment to produce a set of photographs for every trip I would go on and to make a book. The books were all ordered through Blurb, using what at the time were called “trade books” (no idea whether that has changed; I haven’t been on Blurb for years). The idea was simple. It wasn’t about making a great book, it was about making something. There was one more rule: I didn’t allow for an idea to be repeated. Every set of pictures would have to be something different.
Flipping through the books reminded me of the times when I made them. It reminded me of the various trips back then — let’s say going to Brazil for the first (and so far only) time; and it reminded me of trying to figure out photography: how can I make a picture? Most of the books don’t amount to anything other than a memory. But the collection shows me how I grew as a photographer. Because of the restraints I put on myself I wasn’t worried about screwing up. After all, there’s always another picture.
In truth, there’s only one book that still means something to me. I made it in the winter of 2012/13. It’s pictures taken inside the apartment, many of them showing two cats (sadly, both are long gone now). At the time, I had an iPhone 4s, and I decided to play with Hipstamatic (there was the option to make fake tintypes). To get the pictures inside the apartment, I ended up using two LED flashlights to light the cats. If you have ever tried photographing cats, you might know how difficult that is even when you don’t have to set up lights.
The pictures have enormous sentimental value for me, in part because of the memories of the cats, in part because it wasn’t the easiest time in my life (I have been battling with depression for many years).
When I received the book from Blurb, the printing was unable to deal with the rather flat tonality of the pictures. So I decided I would spot varnish the photographs. After some experimentation, I ended up brushing liquid varnish onto each page (for a number of reasons, spray varnishing didn’t work). Each photo required two thin passes of varnish (drying time two to three hours per pass). A month later I had my book. The pictures looked much, much better varnished; given that each picture has a slightly different brush pattern, they all look a little bit different (you can see the varnish in the picture above).
I liked the result so much that I ordered a hardcover version of the book and varnished it. I later gifted the original softcover version to a friend of mine who told me how much he liked it. Actually, I still have one more softcover version — I tried Blurb’s colour and b/w printing options and settled on the colour one: it has a very slight colour shift, but the b/w printing is just too thin.
A little while ago, I read something by Olga Tokarczuk. I don’t remember where it was, and I don’t remember all of the details. It might have been merely some text underneath one of her Instagram posts. But one of her statements stayed with me. It went along the lines of “the time of the linear novel is over” (this quote is from memory, so in all likelihood its actual form — but not the general sentiment — was different).
Next up to read from my stack, I decided, was Szczepan Twardoch’s Drach. I can’t read Polish, but there’s a German translation. I had heard of the book through a review of his latest novel, so I made sure to buy a copy when I was in Berlin last year.
As a little aside, if you’re able to read German (or French), the pool of literature available to you is a lot larger than if you only read English. There’s an enormous amount of literature being translated into German that never makes it into English.
Drach reminds me a little bit of Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), with its idiosyncratic narrator. But while I found Grass’ book mostly irritating, Drach so far is very enjoyable. And it’s also very nonlinear. A chapter will have a range of years on top, and events from all those years will be mixed up inside. Characters’ younger or older selves intermingle, with the effect that it’s largely the history of the location — Silesia — that is being told. This didn’t sit well with conservative German book critics, but others lauded the book for its inventive structure.
Throughout the book, the translator solved the problem of representing the different languages in the book by using a Silesian dialect for those parts of the dialogue where people speak their local lingo (somewhere I read that in the Polish version, there’s German text — I would have to get this confirmed from someone in Poland who has read the book).
And now the idea of nonlinearity already has me thinking about its possible applications in the world of the photobook. I suppose you could see Michael Schmidt’s Ein-Heit (U-Ni-Ty) as adopting such an approach (both as a book and as an installation).
Of course, in some ways photography is always more nonlinear than language, because pictures by themselves are much more open to associating with each other than words. On the other hand, if you make a photobook, in the absence of text you will have to string together your pictures in such a way that people understand what’s going on. A linear structure serves that purpose best.
With that, I’m going to conclude for this email. I hope it’s finding you well.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
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