David started his Instagram account several years ago, approximately in 2016, as the community that was already appreciating his work asked to be able to follow it online.This creation had also happened at the same time he published a book related to his work as a photograph, so he thought this could be a good way to promote it. At first, he was afraid and didn’t want to post his work on Instagram because he thought people would steal his creations and post them on their accounts. With hindsight, he realizes that Instagram helped him sell his book and building a real community at the same time it helped him make contacts to work with. He considers Instagram is a necessary tool for photographers as those who haven’t got an account yet are missing opportunities and are being stigmatized for not being present on the platform: people find it weird if photographers don’t post their work on Instagram, it should be their portfolio.
He doesn’t think it is possible to create something on Instagram. For him, it is only a marketing tool which he can’t personalize: he just distributes his pictures on it, to show what he’s capable of. He criticizes people photographers who concentrate too much on their feed as he believes this don’t have any importance, neither to gain followers nor to show you are artistic. As a photographer, he believes it would be difficult to customize his account as every of his pictures are already coming from his imagination and are all very different, depending on what his clients are asking for. Thus, he prefers to focus on the contents he posts - on his artistic work - than on his Instagram account. He doesn’t consider his work as being different from others, at least on Instagram: “a lot of photographers are using the same devices as I do. They are close form their community and are taking pictures of famous rappers.” Moreover, he doesn’t feel that the blank square format is constraining, especially since he’s usually working on albums’ covers for artists, which are already squared.
David believes he must post regularly in order to be broadcasted by Instagram’s algorithm. He tried to sponsored a few posts but he haven’t seen notable results from those tentatives. The main problem he sees with his account is that people following him are rather fans of the artists he photographs (Booba for instance) than interested by photography. This means his account is really constrained to a particular type of photographs which does not entirely represent his art. His community is not sufficiently targeted. He publishes once in a week, even though he is aware he should post more to gain followers and keep the ones he has. He focuses on Instagram’s stories, the device similar to Snapchat, rather than on posts. Another major issue he encountered on Instagram is that it is too much used: for him, there’s no way one can have a different artistic style than others because what one will do will inevitably have been done by someone else, which makes it difficult in order to be different.
He tries to be as free as he can on Instagram. He affirms that he doesn’t gain any money from his account and doesn’t want to because he feels it would make him less authentic. He makes money thanks to Instagram because it enabled him to have more clients and to sell the pictures he posts afterwards.
He believes that artists that are starting on Instagram need to go back to traditional forms of art sooner or later. First, Instagram might easily become boring because of its constrained physical framework. Moreover, he declares : “The good thing with those devices is that we already know they are surviving through time, it’s not the case for Instagram which is very recent. We don’t know what it’ll become in the following years. And this goes without saying that only broadcasting art through Instagram is also risky since an account could be suppressed. There has been already loads of mutations in social media, Tumblr was used by artists as first and now millions of users left their accounts as if they were ghosts. It could be the same with Instagram.” He himself does many exhibitions and publishes books. According to him, there is also an issue when it comes to mobilization. People liking one picture will not necessarily go an see exhibitions, for instance. Artists must not be fooled by Instagram and its pretended community, but must rather build a community in the real world, which would be ready to actually support their work. However, David used other social media before but he has only used Instagram since he downloaded it. It appears to him as simpler and quicker than other platforms: “it’s the best platform for photographs” he said.