Instagram wants me to be a content machine and I keep resisting
Instagram keeps nudging me toward Reels. Like literally, the app is begging. But pastel portraits are slow, they take hours, there's nothing to film. I tried once, filming my hand smudging for 15 seconds, and it felt so fake. Like I was performing the process instead of doing it.
Meanwhile the still photos of finished faces get a fraction of the reach they used to get, even two years ago. I know the algorithm wants engagement and watching a hand move gets more of it. But I don't want to become a person who makes content. I want to be a person who makes pictures and posts them when they're done.
I keep going back and forth on it. Is this stubbornness going to cost me? Or is everyone else just exhausted and the boring photo accounts actually feel like a relief now?
Curious what other slow-medium artists are doing about it, because the advice online is all "post 3 times a day" and I cannot imagine having that many finished things even in a month.
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I feel this so much. I do printmaking, which is even worse for Reels because the interesting parts are the ones you can't film, the bite of the acid, the pressure of the press, hours that just disappear. Filming it flattens it into a before/after and the actual thinking that went into it is nowhere on screen.
But I've been thinking about this lately. The push toward process content isn't just Instagram being greedy, it's a bigger shift in how people want to see art. They don't want the object, they want the labour. The evidence that a human did it. And there's something in that worth taking seriously, even if the platform's version of it is stupid and reductive.
What I've started doing is refusing the performance but giving them something else, still shots of the plates, the worn screens, the edition prints stacked in a messy pile. Evidence of process without me having to mime it for a camera. It's not what the algorithm wants exactly, but it's a middle ground between being their content machine and being invisible.
I don't know if that helps. But I think resisting is correct, and I think the resistance can be its own kind of position, not just a refusal.
The printmaking comparison is apt, and I know exactly the flattening you mean. I paint botanical specimens, and the hours of observation, the measuring, the studies that get discarded before a single stroke of the final piece lands on paper, none of that is filmable in any honest way. You can show a hand holding a brush, but you cannot show the looking.
And you are right about the shift. There is a real hunger for evidence of the human hand, and some of it is genuine and even moving. But I find it sits awkwardly with the fact that the labour people claim to want is precisely the labour that cannot be shown. The visible part is the performance. The actual work, the attention, the deciding, is interior and quiet and very dull to watch. I suspect what the audience is really asking for is reassurance, not process, and there is a difference between the two.
I do not have an answer for it, only a stubbornness. I keep posting finished plates and letting them be slow. The people who care about the pictures seem to find me anyway.
Oh, the discarded studies bit really hit me. I have a whole drawer of faces I almost got right, and nobody will ever see them, and honestly that's the point. They taught me something and then they were done. Can't film that, can't even explain it.
And you're right, the "honest" part is the whole problem. Filming my hand smudging felt like lying, even though it was literally what I was doing. Because the looking isn't in it. And that's the part that takes all the time.
Some days I wonder if I'm just stubborn and losing reach for no good reason. Other days I think the stubbornness is the only thing keeping the work honest. Not sure which one wins.
That bit about "they want the labour, the evidence that a human did it" really landed for me. I think you're right, and it's a little bittersweet, isn't it? People are hungry for proof a hand was involved, but the thing that proves it is the exact thing you can't show. Printmaking sounds even harder than pastel for that, because at least my smudging is visible, even if it's faked. The acid doing its quiet work under the surface, nobody gets to see that.
I've been wondering if the answer is somewhere in between. Not performing the process but documenting the honest parts of it. The failed plate, the piece you threw away. I don't know. I'm still resisting, but you've given me something to chew on.