The purchase of Instagram by Facebook the other week interested me, if only because I have been noodling around with the service myself in recent weeks. This fits my long-standing pattern of being just enough of an early adopter to leap on board something at the exact moment it becomes passé. At one level I can understand the incredulity about the price (a billion dollars is a lot to pay for a service thats only revenue plan seems to be “get purchased by facebook”) and about the merits of Instagram itself (Jon Stewart epitomised a widespread perspective when he described it as a “thing that kind of ruins your picture.”)
While its value to Facebook may seem dubious, I can see the merit of Instagram itself from a user’s perspective. It is true that at one level those filters are, at worst, ruining your picture as Jon Stewart says and, at best, just adding a cheap veneer of artiness. No doubt people will sneer at the Instagram aesthetic, driven as it is by gimmicks like the graininess, ersatz tilt shift, and old-timey colour filters in the image at the head of this article. Yet while the Instagram effects are in a sense cheap tricks, they are also doing something real, which is stripping the naturalism from the photo and making us see it with fresh eyes. I like that something so popular is making people look differently at their images, and stirring the realisation that even that naturalistic look from a good camera is not a neutral aesthetic choice.
The other point to make about Instagram is that it first grew popular on the iPhone, which until the 4 and 4s models had a terrible camera. Instagram and its predecessors such as Hipstermatic created art out of pretty terrible images: images from the older iPhones had a gritty, degraded look to start with and the software just made the best of that compromised beginning. The Instagram look might now seek to manufacture a grimy feel, but it started from a genuine rawness.
I started playing with Instagram on the iPhone 3GS (with a terrible camera) and have kept doing so on an iPhone 4S (which has a remarkably good camera). One thing I have found is that regardless of the platform, the Instagram look is great for lending a certain poetry to images of dirty, gritty, everyday urbanism. Perhaps it is the aesthetic our crummy urban environment deserves.
