Picture this
PHOTO/KRIS VAGNER
Chelsie Kern and Natalie Handler are among the founders of the Reno InstaGrammys.
The Reno InstaGrammys started as a joke at a party. One thing led to another, and now Reno has a snazzy annual awards show for pro and amateur photography.
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ow that an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide use smartphones, we’ve probably lost count of how many photographs are taken. One estimate from Resource Magazine put it at around a trillion last year. In any case, gone are the days when shooting photos meant lugging around equipment that was bigger than a pocket. A huge percentage of us shoot and post selfies, pet pics, travel shots, bowl-of-cereal shots, and shot upon shot upon shot of pretty much everything. There are different theories on the effects that quantity and accessibility have had on photography. Some miss the days when the medium had a higher barrier to entry. “It’s really weird,” photographer Antonio Olmos told The Guardian in 2013. “Photography has never been so popular, but it’s getting destroyed. There have never been so many photographs taken, but photography is dying.” Try telling that to Chelsie Kern, Natalie Handler and Anna Kernecker, however. They’re the founders of Reno InstaGrammys, an annual photography competition and gala awards event. Where some might see the era of ubiquitous photos as an unwelcome barrage, they see it as opportunity. “It is kind of boring to me to say that because something’s more accessible it’s being watered down,” said Kern. “There is a lot more happening, and you might have to sift through it a little bit more, but everybody can take beautiful photos, and that’s amazing.”
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Photographic memories The InstaGrammys started with an offhand comment made between friends early in 2014. “We were at a barbecue,” said Kern. “We were eating oysters. Somebody showed one of us a picture that our friend posted, and we were joking. We were like, ‘Aw, that’s a good one. That should win an InstaGrammy. Kind of like making fun of ourselves a little bit, you know? But it was a really beautiful picture.’” The thought of merging “Instagram” with “Grammy Award” stuck immediately. “[We thought,] ‘We’ll have this little party and competition for our friends—and a few other people that might come,” said Handler. She was—and still is—on the board of directors at Holland Project, so she was obliged to come up with fundraising ideas for the all-ages arts group. The founders skipped the “small party for our friends” stage and held the first InstaGrammys event in August 2014 at Southside Cultural Center. Kern recalled that it was a hot day, and there was no air conditioning. “We had to bring in every single chair,” she said. “We were too broke, so we couldn’t rent 200 chairs. So we had to get, like, 25 chairs here, 50 chairs here.” “Everything was sourced mostly through people donating,” said Handler. “Or us just being resourceful.” Despite the
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tight budget, the hot room and the mismatched chairs, they remember the evening as a success. “The opening number was this crew of breakdancers that no one really knew about outside of their community of breakdancers,” said Handler. “People were already out of their seats from that first opening-number moment. … So, we packed that place and were over capacity. People were sneaking in, and we were like, ‘Who sneaks into a fundraiser?’”
social media socialites Here’s how the contest works: Professional or amateur photographers submit images via Facebook or Instagram and hashtag them with the name of a category such as #homemeansnevada, #urbanlandscape or #albumcover. There are 20 categories altogether. Initially, organizers conceived of the contest as being for locals, but they’ve since expanded the parameters to include anyone, anywhere. “We had some submissions from out of state last year, but this year even more so,” Handler said. “We have people from Philadelphia, L.A., Salt Lake City, Portland.” “Chelsie, Anna and I, all the cofounders, go through the nominee selection,” she explained, “because there’s, like, thousands of photos to look through, and we would never wish that upon anyone else.” The entries gets narrowed down to 100 finalists, five in each of 20 categories.
