I let a 22-year-old "content strategist" critique my Instagram and I'm still processing it
She told me my photos were too dark. That the lighting was "giving dungeon." She wanted me to show my face more, film myself working, add trending audio. I sat there in the meeting and I thought, I'm 58 years old. I build environments from scrap metal and broken furniture. I am not a content creator. I am not a brand. I am a person who makes things in a studio that looks like a bomb went off in a scrapyard.
But the thing is she wasn't wrong about the engagement numbers. They're flat. They've been flat. And I don't know what to do with that information because I refuse to make the kind of content that would fix it. So I'm stuck in this weird space where I understand the game and I also refuse to play it.
Anyone else just quietly accepting obscurity because the alternative looks unbearable?
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ugh this hits so hard. i'm 26 and i still feel this pressure, so i can only imagine what it's like at 58 with a whole established practice. the thing that gets me is she's probably not wrong about what the algorithm wants but she's also completely missing the point of what you're doing?? like, scrap metal environments, that's physical, that's spatial, that's something you have to stand in front of to really get. instagram flattens everything into the same little square anyway, and chasing that "bright and face-forward" thing just flattens it more.
i paint with watercolor which is already a nightmare to photograph well, and i've had people tell me to film timelapses with trendy music and i'm like... i'm trying to figure out how wet the paper is, i'm not performing. the numbers part is real and it sucks but i honestly think the people who get what you make will find you even if the lighting is "giving dungeon" (which honestly sounds like it fits your work anyway??).
the "giving dungeon" part made me laugh honestly. like yeah, that's the point. a scrapyard with scrap metal in it should look like a scrapyard, not a bright flat lay on a white counter.
i think the hardest thing is knowing she's technically right about the algorithm and still knowing she's wrong about the work. both things can be true and neither one helps you.
Exactly. Both things sit there and neither of them budges.
I keep coming back to it. The algorithm wants a performance, the work wants a kind of silence. You can't serve both. So you pick, and then you live with whatever numbers come. That's the whole thing, really.
Watercolor might be the least Instagram-friendly medium going, you have my sympathies. You're right about the flattening, it's the thing nobody says out loud. The algorithm wants everything to be content, and a painting or a room you walk through isn't content, it's something else entirely. I haven't figured out the answer. I just know I won't turn my studio into a set.