December 6, 2023

I need an outlet that’s not Instagram. I used to love Instagram. I got the app when I was still a bike messenger, so sometime in 2012. I signed up for it as an alternative to Twitter to post shitty phone photos of stuff I saw as a bike messenger and weird deliveries I made on the custom rack I had on my work bike. That Twitter account was a direct suggestion from the rack’s builder, which led to Instagram.

Anyways, that’s just to say that when the app was in it’s infancy, people seemed to like the things I was posting. People seemed to see it (thanks chronological order) and I started discovering what engagement for things I was posting felt like (it felt, good). From there I figured out how I could email photos to myself to post high quality photos to my phone, including scanned film and photos I’d shoot on a real (not 2012 phone-camera) camera. I felt engaged with people, I felt like I could develop a real following.

For a whole variety of reasons, things changed a whole lot since 2012. I still felt like the photography I shared was as good (truthfully, better!) than those early days, but with no fewer followers, the engagement with content fell to perceivably nothing. I thought I had to pivot to shooting videos, I thought I had to use music, I thought I should make slideshow reels of stills so people see them. But I really, really didn’t (don’t) want to.

Enter, where I currently feel with Instagram. I do not want to make video content to promote my stills photography. Fuck, I don’t even care about promoting it as much as I care about sharing it. Photography is both a professional endeavour for me and also a practice I do for myself as an artist, but it’s a practice that I want to share with people. I used to think people wanted to see my work. In that early days of the App, people did and as shitty as it feels to use Likes as a metric of success, the metric was there. I hate admitting it, but I loved the anonymous validation of my work through double-tapped engagement.

But, like I said and we all know, Social Media has changed to be a wild marketing machine. Unless you’re really good at riding trends, into re-hashing your stills practice to ride trends, get swipes, be a video content-creator. It fills me with actual dread to post on Instagram after I’ve spent my time, money, effort on, oh, for example: waiting all year for Bird Season (Eagles and Herons specifically) to shoot film, pulling a roll of 3200 film to 800, hand processing and scanning, to feel like the algorithm is taking a giant shit on my porch. I mean actual dread, it makes me wonder why I’m even trying to share work, if I’m even a good photographer, maybe I’m full of shit and this craft I’ve been working on since I was 14 has been a giant waste of a life’s passion.

So, anyways. Here I am. Trying to get into blogging again. Maybe some friends know, or remember, that when I first moved to school I was into blogging, blogging on the internet. I had a (terrible, awful, horrible) blog in high school, where I shared art or cryptic poems I was too shy to say out loud. But then at ECUAD some friends help me make a real website where I posted a single photo everyday for like, two years or something. It felt like an accomplishment, sometimes it felt like a chore. But overall I think it was good for me. I remember real humans I knew (mostly at school) would see me and tell me IRL that they liked certain photos, or just that they saw them. In hindsight, this early internet should have felt far more flattering, sure, some savvy friends of mine had RSS feeds, but largely people would go see my website once a week, catch up. Make an actual effort to see my photographs. I wish now I had recognized that effort in the moment as the modern internet decides more and more what humans are allowed to see.

This tirade that borders on a rant against how I feel hard done by the internet (this is me, acknowledging the privilege that my mental health is dictated by engagement with my art practice while being thrown out of whack by Social Media and that I’m currently housed, fed and secure from harm) is really just trying to say, I’m going to be posting my photography here now. I’m likely still to succumb to The Apps™, alright, even planning to share a weekly thing. And probably sharing stories and other mindless dopamine boosts. But I’m trying to put my phone down more, hopefully moving forward as much as I can manage personally. I’m tired of feeling at the end of the day that minutes, hours days of my life are staring at a glowing brick thats less about communication daily and more about corporations making a buck.

A final asterisk to all this here: I’ve got a notebook (a real physical notebook!) of ideas for marketing Latency Labs on social media. It feels conflicting for me to on one hand feel so frustrated as an artist that Robot Overlords (this is what I usually call the Algorithm in my head) choose your destiny unless you pay them, but then also (not so) secretly I know the immediate future of my small business depends on it. I do see a future to the business that rides on word of mouth, service and quality. But, I’m not there yet. So breaking my personal self off a bit from the machine is a step for my mental health, so that hopefully the seemingly necessary steps I need to take for Latency’s success seem like something I can tackle.

-D

Blue Heron in November, 2023. It was a bright day for a change, I had previously loaded a roll of Ilford 3200 into my Nikon F5 on a day much duller and lower light. I thought about saving the film and shooting these handsome birds (like six herons on the beach with the dog that afternoon) then I thought better. Pulling film lowers the contrast sortof perfect for high contrast midday light, but maybe more importantly allowed for fast shutter on a long lens. Weird sidenote: the lens I shoot birds on is a modern (ish, it’s an F-Mount SLR lens, Nikon 200-500 f/5.6) lens that has an electromagnetic diaphragm that my F5 can’t stop down, so it can only be shot at f/5.6, also has to be focussed manually.