I posted my first picture to Instagram on 22 November 2010. I think I was using an early iPhone — the 3G perhaps.
It’s just a tree outside my office at Craig Hall on the campus of Missouri State University. I had recently installed the app (it was released that October), and I was looking for something to share. This tree seemed good enough at the time.
I think “good enough at the time” probably has been the ethos of the entire project as I approach 1,000 published photos. Eighteen more to go.
Over the years I’ve put in varying amounts of effort into Instagram. Mostly that effort was focused on documenting something odd or interesting or personal. I have a series of sorts that’s been running for a decade — “stuff you see,” i.e. weird things I run across. Sometimes I even thought I might be doing art. But no matter what, I forgot about the vast majority of these images soon after posting.
More recently, I’ve begun using Instagram to promote my work — especially after 2014 when I successfully moved my academic career from research (the rhetoric of journalism) to creative (documentary filmmaking).
There’s a wide variety of images on my feed. But what hasn’t changed is the utter lack of any audience beyond friends, family, and a few hangers-on. I have 411 followers. I’m happy to have every one of them.
I have given up trying (perhaps I didn’t try hard enough) to grow an audience like the one I had with my Rhetorica blog back in the day.
I’ll alert you when I hit 1,000. Days from now? Weeks? I don’t know. I won’t be trying to hit 1,000.