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Instagram – The death of Contemporary photography – Blog Two

Instagram is the latest photo – sharing application, recently bought by social media network Facebook, allows participants to shoot, edit and share photos with users of the application through the personal world of each one of us. The application allows us to react and give feedback to fellow users in the form of ‘likes’ and comments.

Instagram led to a very interesting phenomenon that could possibly change the world of photography from one end to another. Almost suddenly people who seldom took pictures of their daily life encounters, began to photograph the world around them on a daily basis, increasing and discovering a love for photography. Some have gone even further and consequently decided to study photography

Is this phenomenon, which has brought the art and culture of photography to the forefront and to places and people who were not originally exposed to it, turning its initial audience into amateur photographers urgently and suddenly into millions of pseudo photographers. Its is constantly debated whether this is a positive or negative phenomenon.

Brad Mangin is one photographer (unlike the majority) jumping on the instagram band wagon. He is recognised to spend most of his time shooting peak baseball action with high end Canon DSLRs and 400mm f/2.8 lenses, yet he also sees Instagram as an effective way to show life around the ballpark and also the ‘behind the scenes’ moments.The problem with this wonderful dugout photo with the Gatorade coolers is that Instagram could, in theory, license that image to Gatorade without compensating Brad. Would they? Highly doubt it, but more and more companies are finding utility in using Instagram to create user interaction and build their content-based marketing strategies, so it does fall within the realm of possibility.

Instagram Photographs by Brad Mangin.

This isn’t only having an impact for businesses and promoting products to consumers overall. Its also impacting the fashion world. Photographer Nick Knight recently used Instagram to photograph model Cara Delevinge posing with a bunch of animals in a series that was “inspired by Internet memes, animal GIFs and Autumn/Winter 2012′s taste for grown-up, blown-up overdressing.” There is clearly a sense of parody here, so it seems more of a way to generate publicity than to take beautiful photos.