There’s no question that Instagram has gone beyond selfies and pet pictures and become an important part of the larger artistic conversation. Photographers, not surprisingly, have found lots of ways to play on this platform – showing work from ongoing projects, introducing personal pictures, note-taking and experimenting. There are many outstanding photographers on Instagram, and in this new column, Andy Adams, who directs @FlakPhoto Projects, will recommend a few of them.
Andy Adams directs FlakPhoto Projects, a digital/arts lab focused on promoting photography in all of its forms. Find him on Instagram @FlakPhoto.
Michelle Groskopf
Garry Winogrand famously said, “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” You can’t help but think that Groskopf is compelled by a similar drive – to show us the world not only as it is but how it looks to her camera. And like Winogrand, you can spot a Groskopf picture a mile away. Her vibrant images are in your face and bursting with color. She shoots and shares a lot, and that approach makes her feed a revolving doorway into how she sees and works. Last year, she was an American Photography 34 winner for her Refinery29 story about The Miss Amazing Nationals.
Tema Stauffer
Like a lot of teachers, Stauffer encourages her students to use Instagram as a way to discover and study photography. She uses it as journal to talk about her creative practice. Stauffer’s work explores the social, economic, and cultural landscape of American spaces, and her images combine documentary realism with lyrical beauty. Her latest project is UPSTATE, a series of urban and rural landscapes in and around Hudson, New York. Daylight Books will publish a monograph to coincide with Stauffer’s show at the Reece Museum at Tennessee State University in October 2018.
Vasantha Yogananthan
“I see photography as a starting point – a malleable material open to interpretations.” It makes sense that an imagemaker who thinks this way would gravitate toward a digital platform that lends itself to visual ambiguities. Yogananthan keeps three IG feeds: his personal diary; one focused on Chose Commune, the publishing house he runs; and another that tracks A Myth of Two Souls, his seven-book serial retelling of The Ramayana. Yogananthan’s images are windows into his imagination, and they overtly blend fact and fiction. Watch for Dandaka, the fourth installment of Souls, in September.
Anthony Gerace
Occasionally you’ll find visual experimenters on Instagram, and Gerace is one of the best. His images straddle the line between landscape, portraiture, and collage on printed material, most of which he makes himself. Gerace’s cut-ups exploit the transience of print photography, and they’re an inquiry into what he calls “image death” – an exploration into how far you can push a picture before it breaks. His angular, vivid compositions are sourced from popular materials dating from the 1890s to the 1940s, and he cites Daido Moriyama, Roe Ethridge and Collier Schorr as inspirations. Gerace’s first book, And Another Thing, was published by Aint-Bad last year.
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
An-My Lê
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Brian Ulrich
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Flor Garduno
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Domestic Disorder: Re-Viewing the Photographs of Robert Cumming
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Zanele Muholi and the Women's Mobile Museum
At this point in her career, the barriers faced by South African photographer Zanele Muholi – barriers preventing her from speaking her truth and taking control of her own image – would seem to have been dispatched, conquered by the force of her powerful photographs and stunning, theatrical self-portraits.
A Retrospective Presents 40 Years of Dawoud Bey's Empathetic Photographs
Like Harlem Redux, Bey’s latest series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, its title a reference to a line in Langston Hughes’s classic poem Dream Variations, applies the photographer’s compassionate sense of looking to a historically charged landscape.
Isaac Julien's Pictures and Progress
Reinterpreting and expanding the conventions of film and photography, Isaac Julien examines the marred history of race relations in the U.S. through the life of Frederick Douglass.
Liliana Porter: “Humor is a Tool”
In her exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, Liliana Porter peoples her tableaus with a range of figurines, from Mickey Mouse and Mao to Che Guevara and Elvis, creating playful, subversive images along the way.