Instagram has become the easy villain of contemporary photography. It gets blamed for flattening the gaze, standardizing styles, rewarding the superficial.
But that critique usually misses the key point: a platform doesn’t ruin a visual language on its own. What warps it is the relationship of dependence we build around it.
Instagram is a medium. A channel. A shop window. It can be useful, even energizing. The problem starts when it stops being a place to show work and becomes the place where it’s decided what work deserves to exist. That’s where the shift begins: you no longer photograph to explore or to narrate, but to perform. To fit. To be legible inside a system that rewards the immediate.
Dependence doesn’t announce itself at first. It arrives through small adjustments: changing the framing so it works vertically, simplifying a series so every image “stands on its own,” repeating a formula because it once got a lot of likes, editing toward an aesthetic the feed will “accept.” Little by little, the work is tuned not to what the project demands, but to what the screen demands. Then the most serious thing happens: the platform enters the process before the idea. Before the shutter, even. You shoot thinking about performance, not meaning. Photography becomes a conditioned act, guided not by light, or scene, or emotion, but by the expectation of reaction.
Instagram doesn’t reward complexity. Not because it’s evil, but because its engine is attention, and attention is impatient. What travels best is what’s recognizable, fast, instantly responsive. That pressure pushes images toward two second consumption: impact, clarity, aesthetics. Sustained over time, that pressure ends up shaping visual culture.
That’s why we see so many “perfect” photographs that say nothing. Impeccable images with no risk, no friction, no questions. As if photography were a decorative discipline. Beauty isn’t the problem. Beauty without tension becomes a template.
Dependence also shows up in the author’s mood. Posting an image and waiting for a verdict. Measuring worth in metrics. Feeling like a work “failed” if it didn’t reach numbers. That mechanism is corrosive because it moves evaluation outward: judgment gets outsourced. You stop deciding whether an image works based on intention or coherence, and start deciding based on reception.
The result is anxious photography. Photography of reaction, frequency, schedule. The camera becomes a tool for constant content production, not an instrument of thought. And when the goal is not to vanish from the feed, long time disappears. Slow processes disappear. Series that need to mature disappear. Searches that don’t promise immediate applause disappear. The problem isn’t posting on Instagram. The problem is having nothing outside Instagram. Because if everything depends on that platform, it also depends on its rules, its updates, its algorithm, its statistical whims. Your visual identity ends up hanging from a thread you don’t control.
The way out isn’t moralistic or nostalgic. It’s not about “going back” to anything, or demonizing networks. It’s about recovering autonomy. Using Instagram as a tool, not a judge. Building a personal ecosystem where photography can breathe: a website, a properly ordered archive, a PDF or a zine, a series dummy, a short text that provides context, a production rhythm that answers to the project and not to anxiety. It also implies a simple but radical move: deciding that some images are not for Instagram. Not because they’re “better,” but because they require another tempo, another space, another kind of reading. Photography, when it’s real, sometimes needs silence around it. It doesn’t need to compete.
Instagram isn’t destroying photography. What’s at stake is the photographer’s independence in the face of a system that rewards repetition and speed. The platform isn’t the problem. The dependence is. And the good news is that dependence can be broken: not by closing the account, but by taking back control of the gaze.
