If you’ve been online at all in the last few days you will be aware of the controversy that new terms and conditions announced by Instagram have caused, with photographers leaving the site.
Instagram have reacted and issued a statement on their blog, which in part reads:
Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that wed like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.
which is perhaps itself clear but confusing as there seemed to be little other way to take their original statement. Those who use Instagram will doubtless be waiting to see the ‘updated language’, and I think we may have a new term to add to our language. When next you realise you really made a mistake and have to change your intended actions you will no longer be making a U turn or changing your mind, it will just be ‘updating your language.’
But I’ve not messed with Instagram myself as it seems to require a smart phone, and my phone now past its tenth birthday is decidedly stupid. All it does is make and receive phone calls and it doesn’t even include a camera. Perhaps one day I’ll feel it necessary to join the modern world, but not yet. And certainly the Instagram images that appear on my Facebook feed – some of them from very good photographers – don’t I think do them any favours.
But Pete Brook on Wired’s Raw File blog has a set of fine images from Instagram of the Nigerian floods by Gideon Mendel which prompted me to write this. There is an interesting discussion about how this work – which has reached a wide audience – relates to his more conventional work on the subject, and also about its marketing as art. What makes his work stand out from much of Instagram is of course his photographic eye, and his use of “either #nofilter or with the lo-fi filter just to tweak the contrast.” #nofilter seems to be something few Instagram users have discovered and it really makes a difference!
