Instagram is a hugely successful platform, and as successful things tend to, it comes down to a simple premise: People want to share photos of every bit of their lives, and the monstrosities in everyone's pockets allow them to do it. They just needed a platform, one that preferably edits photos to cover up the surveillance camera appearance of early smartphone cameras, and one that offers instant and gratuitous feedback. Something like 55 million photos are now uploaded to Instagram every day.
That's a lot of photos, and naturally a ton of them involve similar subject material. The short video above, by Thomas Jullien, pulls together 852 of those 55 million photos, from 852 different Instagrammers, and compiles them into a montage that's striking in both execution and conformity. Jullien clearly put a lot of work in, and it's awesome to watch; of course, Instagrammers also put in a lot of work, by virtue of taking the same pictures.
The framing aspect could probably be chocked up to Instagram's square format, as it tends to encourage center framing. Plus, Instagram says it hosts some 16 billion photos, of which there are assuredly plenty of similar works. Does that mean that this video is a biting commentary on the faux-authenticity of the selfie generation, as I saw it described in some long-gone tweets?
It's easy to hate on the Instagram aesthetic—the idea that filters add enough gravitas to our lives to justify incessantly sharing them—as many, including yours truly, have. But at this point, when that critique can be applied to just about everything we do—humans are narcissistic to the core, and the internet has enabled many of us for most of our natural lives—it seems like the lazy way out.
There are more than 1.5 billion smartphone users worldwide, and they're all documenting every part of their lives because that's what we do now. Tens of millions of photos get taken every day, and yes, a whole lot of them are more or less the same, and get processed through the same few dozen filters. And yes, it's easy to be a photo snob and say we've run out of ideas.
Ansel Adams already took some pictures of Half Dome, so anyone else who takes one can piss off, right? Of course not. Our photos are largely personal. Even if we share them with our bloated networks of internet friends and pray for higher engagement metrics because they feel so good, they're still ours, and they're still corralled in our own little social bubbles. So who cares if some clown from some other city had the same thought?