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.
Jessica Auer
Auer is a Canadian photographer now living in Iceland, and her photography examines the relationship between people and places. She’s a frequent traveler so her IG functions as a visual map of her whereabouts and includes views from the Yukon Territory, Greenland, Sweden, France, Spain, and the Lofoten Islands. Hers is a casual approach blending personal experience and professional practice that provides a glimpse into the artist’s creative process. Last year, Éditions du renard published January, a book that explores walking as an artistic activity. She is currently working on a series about the impact of tourism in Iceland.
Takahiro Kaneyama
Like a lot of photographers, Kaneyama shows a mix of personal snapshots and professional updates on his feed. What’s exciting is the way that IG has provided a new outlet for him to experiment with What Leaves Are Falling…, a long-term series about family, aging, and chronic mental illness. Nearly 20 years in the making, a book of these images was published in Japan in 2016 and IG has been a convenient platform for showing outtakes from that project as well as new images from the ongoing series. This year, he’s exhibiting a selection of prints from the series at The Gallery in the Nikon Plaza Shinjuku, Tokyo, on the occasion of the Sagamihara Photo Award.
Matthew Genitempo
“I made this picture in Austin, Texas, after a long day of swimming. My partner and I went to Deep Eddy Cabaret afterwards to play some pool and drink the coldest beer in Texas.” Genitempo shares personal photos like this most days. Much of his work celebrates the big-sky views of the American Southwest, and his images are loaded with moody color and cinematic character. He shoots from the hip with an iPhone – a reminder that the best camera is the one you have with you. Last year, Genitempo co-launched the Trespasser imprint with photographer Bryan Schutmaat. His latest series, Jasper, about men living off the grid in the Ozarks, will be on view at FotoFilmic’s PULP space in Vancouver this summer.
Siân Davey
Davey came to photography in her forties after a 15-year career in psychotherapy. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but her work since then has focused largely on the internal mechanics of the family dynamic. She uses IG as a venue for showing the photographs from her documentary projects – many of them intimate observations of her own children. These are sensitive, beautiful images that offer insights into her role as artist and mother. Davey’s photographs have been selected for inclusion in the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition for the last three years, and her book Martha, a study of her adolescent daughter, is forthcoming from Trolley Books.
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
Beginning March 14, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is presenting On Contested Terrain, the artist’s first major survey show, with nearly 125 images.
Brian Ulrich
Brian Ulrich, Power House Gym, 2008. Collection o ...
Jungjin Lee
Jungjin Lee’s work recalls photography’s early art...
New Photography 2023 | Museum of Modern Art, New York
MoMA’s 2023 iteration of its seminal exhibition Ne...
Shirin Neshat
Photographer and filmmaker Shirin Neshat is among ...
Flor Garduno
The photographs of Flor Garduño create a bridge be...
Domestic Disorder: Re-Viewing the Photographs of Robert Cumming
The film director Alfred Hitchcock used to complai...
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.