2. Netting Images for Purpose (continued) Here pictures happened to have what a large part of the community likes. But what about those beneath the radar? Those without a ‘stickiness’ to their pages? I decided to pick an image out of the thirty that had come into the designated hashtag gallery and write a feature on the artist. That feature would be treated as a magazine cover and placed on the sister website www.thehashtagofman.com which I made as a kind of enlarger so images could be seen bigger than what one sees on the smartphone. This became the tipping point. In an app which is loaded with likes, emoticom replies, and single word appreciations such as ‘cool’ and ‘sick’ a dedicated feature essay written not about the photo but about the photographer’s way of seeing has that gold social capital. And the brand was borne. After twenty-seven weeks from its failure to launch the site plays host to over 400 followers and has recieved over 6100 quality lifestyle images such as @9magdalena9 on the opposite page. Submissions have risen from 1 a day to anywhere between 25 and 90 images and it has a wonderful engaging community. During the weeks,I have created events like the Summer Soul-stice Shoot and every four weeks there is a montage of nine photographs, posted and labelled as CONTACTsheet where photographers can see other talented works from a genre of photography which has its roots in The Family of Man. The weekly feature remains the root to this project, where each week I write a 250 word reflection, now called SOTW (the acronym for shot of the week), on a contributors work. Like Hope, I have found a niche and what works and now the social marketing has begun. The statistics for the site I have included as I watched over it for a week and bean counted the results. It is obvious that as my maintenance stops on the site the numbers of submissions begin to fall off. Being in the face of the audience is important. But part of my ‘change agency’ was to play with this, bring in something of what my project was about and see what would happen if I slowed things down. What if in the rapid pace of Instagram which reloads in fractions of a second I created something that had a reload time span of a week? How would my audience change or grow? I don’t know. I have nothing to compare it to. There is significant growth in what has been done in the way it has been done but probably what is more important is that the ‘brand’ has drawn out a certain class of Instagrammer. This is Instagram for the thinker, the reflector, the humanist and social observer. One will not find painted fingernails nor ‘pouts and posers’. The tagline is ‘life.daily.now.’ and the battery of images show that. This one is a project on the rise and in the making. It has provided agency for change, and that seen in the community which has collected here. The bigger test is in this always-on globally connected society can we surpass Steichen’s draw of two million images, a kind of analogue days and ways versus a digital days and ways. Two and a half years from now I’ll be able to have a better view. But there are early lessons already. The digital, this ‘brand’ offers a connection. Everyone during this process can be seen. Unlike with Steichen’s selection process. There is no closed envelope, hierarchal top down approach. In this way, even if we do not attain the numbers that Steichen received the quality of experience, for those who remain the unseen, in that they were never featured, are still visible by touring through the hashtag. As Hope pointed out in her interview that regarding time and practice ‘Instagram has taught me to see in a nicer way - to take more inter-
esting pictures. The way I photograph now is definitely because I learned it from looking at other’s work on Instagram and in that way the [Instagram] app pushes me to be more creative’. Today’s unseen could be tomorrows popular in the Instagram ecosystem. Hope saw 5000 as a high amount of followers and now has 57,000 herself. The #hashtagofman is now embedded into the cognisphere and what becomes of it remains to be seen, as yet unknown. At the moment it is transforming into the ‘tHoM’ project which has been inspired by an unfolding taxonomy of imagery that is streaming into #thehashtagofman. Additionally there have been a few stand out moments while acting as curator. Outside of the inspiring comments and a recent mention in a posting on a French Arts channel website it is about the people. When contributors you don’t know address photos of the birth of their first born or come out from behind a privacy status in order to share a photo in the memory of one who recently passed away - because they ‘believe in the integrity of the project’ this is something simply outstanding. Juxtaposing these findings with my original question of Instagram and brands and a question of how pervasive this will be in the future, there is some evidence here of that happening. This is an ongoing study with the future unknown at the moment.
6100 IMAGES
0027 WEEKS 77