Some thoughts on ‘the instagram asthetic is over’
There’s been an article in the Atlantic that’s been shared a bit recently,
the Instagram aesthetic is over, and I have some thoughts on it! So, old-fashioned writing based blog post coming up – yay!
What the article is saying is that there is an aesthetic – bright colours, people standing in front of walls, latte art, nicely done hands holding ice cream, cars from the side (and the more bohemian, white and brown, kinfolk variant thereof, as recorded on kinspiracy) – that has been so popular it has become associated with Instagram as a whole, rather than just being one strand on it. This has been going on for years, but at some point in mid 2018 things started to change, and people got sick of it, and a new aesthetic has started to emerge, led by younger people, which is (or appears to be) more spontaneous and authentic. Lower production values, even intentionally bad lighting. There’s some app that makes things look like film photos from 1998 apparently (seriously, 1998 is when I was 16 and therefore yesterday. How did I get so old?).
You know I love me some Instagram clichés, and I have written about this before. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them as such, and they have helped me do fun stuff. But fashions are fashions and I agree its time for a change. I do sometimes wonder why some avo toast pictures have like 10000 likes when there are literally hundreds of practically identical ones, but I don’t know that those kind of pictures are necessarily inauthentic. Clearly they can be – and it makes me sad to think of all this food being thrown away uneaten by influencers (I can confirm that 100% of the food shown on my Instagram or blog will then have been consumed by a real person, most likely me). But they don’t HAVE to be. I always thought the good thing about blogging, and later instagramming, was that it made you notice the lovely things in your life, the little corners of happiness and photogeneity.
I guess what I sort of have a problem with is the suggestion that this new style is so much more authentic. Because to me this looks very very familiar. This will show my age a lot, but it’s the nineties, basically. The Face magazine. Britpop. Chloe Sevigny circa Kids*. The thing that makes the difference between something being basically just a crap picture, and an artfully under/overexposed one, is that the subject is someone cool/thin/interesting. As such, it’s more difficult to copy than the pink wall ice creams, so it probably won’t take the world by storm quite so much, and that might be a good thing. But it’s just a fashion coming round again, its not some magical new direction. Look at these pictures from the nineties, the could be right out of the people quoted in that article (how gorgeous is Chloe though?). It’s just another style of photography, subsequent generations will always find different ways to express themselves, and this is just it coming round again. I’m looking forward to seeing the ways this will filter through into my older, still primary coloured instagram!
* in researching this I found out that Rosario Dawson is in kids, who knew! I really want to watch it again now, I wonder where I can find it
