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 POP 3 (1) pp. 83–88 Intellect Limited 2012

Philosophy of Photography
Volume 3 Number 1
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Miscellaneous. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.3.1.83_7

Charlotte Champion
Independent Scholar

instagram: je-suis-là?

1. Instagram was The ways in which photographs are taken, distributed and viewed have, once again, changed. It is
launched in October often claimed that the camera phone has given rise to new forms of photographic agency. It has
2010 and has, at the
time of this article’s certainly provided novel contexts in which snapshots of and by individuals proliferate. This article
writing, roughly 100 explores contemporary popular photography through examination of the Instagram, a smartphone
million users, making
it the fastest growing
application that purports to offer a new mode of instantaneous visual communication.1 Instagram
social network. It has allows its users to take photographs and to apply preset graphic filters before uploading and sharing
generated over five them on a dedicated social networking service. The sharing and communication functions of
billion photographs
and counting. In April Instagram recall the telegram (as registered in the name) and the available filters cite familiar
2012 Facebook bought aesthetic modes of film-based photography. Instagram photographs are visually distinctive. They
Instagram for one bil- are square digital images, mostly made with camera phones and viewed on-screen, that are defined
lion dollars.
by being shared. Their making and dissemination are bound together and determined by the
aesthetic concerns sedimented in preset visual options designed for easy manipulation and speedy
use. As a composite form of the production, dissemination and consumption of photographs,
Instagram enables one to describe critically some of the ways in which social networking has
changed photography.
The altered temporality of photographs (Murray 2008), reinforced by forms such as Instagram, is
of particular interest because it signals a range of ongoing shifts in the relationships pertaining

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Charlotte Champion

between photography’s ostensive character, expressions of social and personal identity, possibilities
of communication and photography’s aesthetics. This mixture of material, commercial, aesthetic and
temporal conditions suggests that the most appropriate category through which to understand the
Instagram is that of its use.
Conditioned in part by the extrinsic character of a social networking service, the Instagram
photograph shapes the way in which its users visually record their everyday lives and, importantly,
has an affect on what is considered photo-worthy. As such, a critical account of the Instagram
photograph can be posed in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of photographic usage, which
makes the social functions of photography central, ascribes to them a ritualistic function and, impor-
tantly, disavows the autonomy of the photographic image as an aesthetic object.
The rise of popular photography has often been codified in terms of so-called ‘Kodak Culture’
and its corporate slogans, ‘We capture your memories forever’ and ‘You press the button, we do the
rest’. And this culture has tended to be anlaysed in terms of the social changes that the corporatiza-
tion of imaging practices introduced into social life (Chalfen 1987). A key aspect of this particular
photographic culture was the manner in which it revolved around the construction and celebration
of family memories. For Bourdieu, this was a prime example of the way in which the values associ-
ated with photographs were determined by their social functions (1990: 19). Fundamentally, in this
context, the function of photography was to render memories as ‘good memories’. For Bourdieu, for
instance, this contributed significantly to the communication of familial values and acted retrospec-
tively to construct truths associated with key familial events.
The idea that the primary function of photography is to facilitate reminiscence has dominated
the theorization of photography more generally (Barthes 1981; Sontag 1973). But it was arguably not
until the point at which the networking of images, enabled by digital technologies, took precedence
that this expectation of photography’s role in social communication and identity formation was fully
realized. This, however, occurred alongside and as part of broader social changes in which the family
was displaced as a privileged photographic subject in favour of the self-representation of relatively
deracinated individuals (Van Dijk 2008: 60). Such developments have often been taken to mark the
emergence of new freedoms, in which the individual’s ability to opt for one kind of social bond over
another is key. With Instagram, the tool of such agency – a camera incorporated in a smart phone
and coupled with a social network – certainly marks a shift in the relationship between the terms
previously assumed to mediate between the personal, the private and the public. And this techni-
cally facilitated reordering of the social conditions of photographic identification, brings with it a
significant change in the agency attributed to the user (Cobley and Haeffner 2009).
The fact that the Instagram photograph could be considered a narcissistic medium in which
individualism and an egocentric perspective prevails, does not negate its social importance, it merely
displaces this from the territory of previously important forms such as the family. In fact, to its users,

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2. Describing photogra- it would seem that this form of photography continues to frame the formation of social bonds in and
phy in these terms and
similar has been the
through the process of sharing. Instagram photography no longer confirms to the social function of
subject of much debate documenting things like family rituals, but in many ways social ritual remains central to it. If
(see, for instance, Van anything, in cutting the snapshot loose from the domestic sphere, the Instagram takes on a more
House 2011; Murray
2008; Okabe 2004; Pe- emphatically ritualistic function.
tersen 2009; Koskinen Instagram generalizes the sense of photography as social ritual that was identified by Bourdieu.
2003, see also Rivére In doing so, it transforms the modes of identification that are performed through the photograph.
2006).
The Instagram functions as a register of social ritual without ‘specialness’. The conditions under
which Bourdieu could influentially claim that a photograph as ‘a private product for private use, has
no meaning, value or charm except for a finite group of subjects, mainly those who took it and those
who are its objects’ (1990: 87) have altered. But forms like the Instagram do not dissolve the divide
between private and public spheres. Rather, they reshape how intimacy is defined and experienced
(Hjorth 2009: 158). One might say that, by virtue of being shared on a social network, the paradoxical
mode of the Instagram photograph’s intimacy is constitutively public.
The culture of Instagram encourages its users to share events such as enjoying a cup of coffee or
reading the morning newspaper. This adds an expansive twist to Bourdieu’s statement to the effect
that ‘[n]othing may be photographed apart from that which must be photographed’ (1990: 24
emphasis added). With Instagram, that everything may be photographed transforms the social
imperative with regard to what must be photographed. Thus, the field of the photographable is
broadened indefinitely to the point of becoming indeterminate, whilst at the same time still being
subject to the determining imperative that a photograph be made. What is interesting in this is the
broadening and the anonymization of predetermined modes that structure what is photographed
and the identifications that this might facilitate.
Bourdieu’s study of photographic usage clearly distinguishes between photo-worthy subjects
and those that are not, thus: ‘one does not photograph something that one sees every day’ (1990:
34). Whilst, on the face of it, these words might seem to have lost their critical purchase, in fact, they
continue to apply. One look at the ‘popular page’ of Instagram – ‘popularity’ being a category oper-
ated by an algorithm set to select a number of often viewed and ‘liked’ photographs – reveals an
over abundance of coke bottles, cups of coffee, sunsets and ice creams. Instagram culture hinges on
capturing the ‘ordinary’, ‘fleeting’, ‘mundane’ and ‘banal’.2 The act of sharing is integral to this:
every user knows the photograph will be shared on the dedicated network and possibly also more
extensively. What is thus deemed photo-worthy is what the individual user finds interesting at any
particular moment. But this notion of personal interest, with its overtones of agency and implied
autonomy, is defined heteronomously. It is a moment of the photograph’s destined function in the
social network. In this context, one can recall that it is a commonplace to remark the importance of
photographs in mediating social relationships (Edwards 2005: 27). But the Instagram photograph no

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Charlotte Champion

longer has a material form that can be said simply to occupy the physical space often thought neces-
sary for the photograph to fulfil this function.
Here it becomes necessary to reconsider the idea that Instagram photography enforces a certain
notion of predetermined social bond in the form of sharing. As a form of socialization it is deter-
mined extrinsically, whereas prior forms of photography might be said to have participated intrinsi-
cally as material formations of social relationships. This difference is crucial. So determined, on most,
if not all, occasions the social only takes on form extrinsically in the act of networked sharing and not
intrinsically in the situated taking of a photograph. The act of sharing, conceived as a mode of social
being, becomes a one-way transmission from user to audience and not a participatory sharing in
photographic situations, however attended the value of this may have been.
As a medium that ‘captures’, ‘freezes’ or ‘preserves’ time it is not surprising that photography’s
primary functions and uses were concerned with and defined by documenting special occasions.
What is interesting about the Instagram is that it retains some of the functions of representation and
acts as a vehicle for identification whilst not documenting socially defined ‘specialness’. The
Instagram photograph, like the ‘domestic’ Polaroid before it, relies on a relatively strong sense of
immediacy that structures the possibility of its being shared. With hardly any time lapse between
taking and sharing, it is almost possible to follow an Instagram user in real time depending on the
frequency of his or her uploads. Precisely because of this speed of usage, each Instagram photo-
graph is rapidly replaced by the next leaving little room for one to develop an ‘intimate relationship’
with anything photographed (Rubenstiein and Sluis 2008: 22). If each instance of a cup of coffee
imaged is quickly replaced by the next, the individual values of photographs no longer carry much
weight. A concomitant lack of social relationship between the photograph, photographer and
viewer(s) effectively disallows Instagram photographs the function of documenting past events. But
the Instagram doesn’t care that it has no such posterity.
It is no longer the depicted subject that counts but the very act of sharing itself (Simons 2010:
572). With Instagram, so to speak, the act of sharing in the taking of a photograph has been super-
seded by the act of sharing in a taken photograph. And photography’s burden of representation no
longer seems to matter so much in a context defined by the idea that if the photo isn’t shared the
event didn’t happen.
What this hints at is not only an altered relationship to the use of photography and the multipli-
cation of different photographic subjects (cupcakes, coffee and sandwiches instead of the Eiffel
Tower, the Pyramids, etc.), but a more general transformation of the temporal and spatial form of
photographic ostension (the photograph’s function of pointing mutely towards something else-
where and in the past). The function of pointing out things that have happened elsewhere does not
disappear in the Instagram photograph. Rather, the significance of the spatial displacement involved
accrues a different meaning through the photograph’s altered relationship to time.

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 Instagram

For Instagram users, one supposes, the act of taking a photograph of their coffee and sharing it
is paramount, or at least comes prior to, any more embodied act of its enjoyment. This apparently
mundane observation in fact implies that the photograph as a mode of temporalization of social life
is transformed. No longer is the photograph a discreet material register of the past, whether this is
conceived in affirmative, melancholic or disciplinary terms. The new form of photography’s tempo-
ralization of social life is anticipatory. The implication is that the newly inflected subject of photog-
raphy can only enjoy or be enjoyed, affect or be affected, subject or be subjected, after the photograph,
outside its bounds, and in the knowledge that it acts on an object that is already visually codified.
This photograph precedes ‘real-time’ pleasures, acts and identifications that are yet to unfold. One’s
soup, salad or sandwich call for photography prior to the act of their consumption. Actually eating
and drinking them becomes something like an afterimage or an echo, that is, it takes place as an
antecedent to a photographic precedent that has already been uploaded and shared.
The photograph uploaded is no longer ‘about’ conquering the distance between people across
time to show them what has been. Whereas Barthes argued that each photograph was a form of
Ça-à-été, pointing not only to the history of the subject in the photograph but also at their mortality,
the Instagram photograph is a form of je-suis-là/here I am (Simons 2010: 572) that no longer refers
to a past but affirms a hollowed out present. It is a visual assertion accompanied by a mute question
mark: je-suis-là? To paraphrase J. Van Dijk, writing on an earlier form of popular photography, the
Instagram photograph carries over into digital culture the form of redundancy previously attributed
to postcards which were, ‘meant to be thrown away after they are received’ (2008: 62). It remains to
be seen, however, what the terms ‘meant’ and ‘received’ (and, for that matter, ‘thrown’ and ‘away’)
might signify in the wake of this most recent inflection of photography as a form of social use.

references
Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang.
Bourdieu, P. (1990), Photography: A Middlebrow Art (trans. Shaun Whiteside), Cambridge: Polity Press.
Chalfen, R. (1987), Snapshot Versions of Life, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular
Press.
Cobley, P. and Haeffner, N. (2009), ‘Digital cameras and domestic photography: Communication,
agency and structure’, Visual Communication, 8: 123, pp. 123–46.
Edwards, E. (2005), ‘Photographs and the sound of history’, Visual Anthropology Review, 21: 1–2,
pp. 27–46.
Hjorth, L. (2009), ‘Photo shopping: A snapshot on camera phone practices in an age of Web 2.0’,
Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 22: 3, pp. 157–59.

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Charlotte Champion

Koskinen, I. (2003), ‘The first steps of multimedia: Towards and explosion of banality?’, paper
presented at the The First Asia-Europe Conference on Computer Mediated Interactive Communications
Technology, Tagalay City, the Philippines, 20–23 October.
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Sontag, S. (1973), On Photography, New York: Delta.
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Contributor details
Charlotte Champion is a graduate of the Philosophy of Art programme at Leiden University and an
avid user of Instagram.
E-mail: c.k.f.champion@gmail.com

Charlotte Champion has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

88
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