Instafame

Lachlan MacDowall

Description

Launched in 2010 as a modest mobile photo-sharing application for Apple’s iPhone that uploads images in a square format and add filters that mimic vintage photographs, Instagram has grown to become one of the most-used social media platforms, alongside Facebook and Twitter. This book examines the rise of Instagram and its impact on visual culture by considering how it has shaped two inter-related and highly popular global forms: graffiti and street art. The book traces the intuitive connections between graffiti, street art and Instagram, beginning with the simple observation that when turned on its side, the scrolling feed of Instagram images displayed on a mobile phone resembles graffiti viewed from the windows of a moving train. It argues that with Instagram’s privileging of flows of images tied to mobile devices and the real-time battles for impact and attention that this generates, is more closely synced with the aesthetics of graffiti and street art and the needs of its producers and consumers than any other digital platforms. It analyses the architecture, data, networks and audiences of Instagram, showing how they underpin a dramatic shift in how graffiti and street art are produced and consumed.

Acknowledgements

Chapter One: Introduction: The Instagram Era

Chapter Two: Graffiti and Street Art

Chapter Three: Global Media Histories

Chapter Four: The Architecture of Instagram

Chapter Five: The Streets on Instagram

Chapter Six: Instagram on the Streets

Chapter Seven: The Top 100

Chapter Eight: Conclusion: The Death of Instagram

Sujets

• Photographie
• Photographie
• Royaume-Uni
• Montana
• ART
• Melbourne
• Australia
• JR
• Banksy
• Internet
• Shepard Fairey
• États-Unis
• Cultural Studies
• General
• Médias sociaux
• Rome
• Great Britain
• Design
• Invader
• Ra?ko
• Media studies
• Photography
• United Kingdom
• General officer
• Cost
• Juxtapoz
• Andre the Giant Has a Posse
• Invasion (disambiguation)
• Social media
• Street art in Melbourne
• KAWS
• Mr. Brainwash
• Reino Unido
• Roma (serie de televisión)
• USA
• Popular Culture
• Digital Media

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781789380392
• Langue: English

Extrait

This edition first published in the UK in 2019 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
This edition first published in the USA in 2019 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Technologies
Design: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Lachlan MacDowall
Production editor: Faith Newcombe
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-983-5
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78938-039-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-040-8
Printed and bound by Short Run, UK.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) Licence. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

This book is dedicated to my crew, the TMs: Nelly, Rose and Belle.
– Lachlan MacDowall (@graffitistudies)
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: The Instagram Era
CHAPTER TWO
Graffiti and Street Art
CHAPTER THREE
Global Media Histories
CHAPTER FOUR
The Architecture of Instagram
CHAPTER FIVE
The Streets on Instagram
CHAPTER SIX
Instagram on the Streets
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Top 100
CHAPTER EIGHT
Conclusion: The Death of Instagram
REFERENCES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has had a long gestation and one of its beginnings is in the months before the launch of Instagram in 2010, when a Banksy stencil was painted over by graffiti cleaning contractors in Melbourne’s Hosier Lane. The destruction of the Banksy artwork triggered public outrage and a City of Melbourne review of street art within its boundaries, which I undertook, assisted by Chris Parkinson. Discussions with Eddie Butler-Bowden from the City of Melbourne about the divergent values accorded graffiti and street art and his interest in a Top 100 list – a device I found both problematic and pleasurable – helped shape this study.
As early as 2005, Joe Austin gave me some encouraging and helpful feedback on the idea of a book on graffiti’s media history via an email exchange that eventually informed Chapter 3. The first attempts to think about the methodological implications of Instagram were developed in 2014 in collaboration with Poppy de Souza, who brought fresh ideas to graffiti and street art based on her own research into digital platforms. These ideas were eventually published as ‘I’d double tap that!! Street art, graffiti, and Instagram research’ in Media, Culture & Society in 2018.
An early version of Chapter 5 was presented at the Street Art and Urban Creativity Conference in Lisbon in 2015 and later published in Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City (2017). My thanks to Pedro Neves Suarez, Susan Hansen and Jacob Kimwall for the warm reception and questions they posed of the original paper and editors Konstantinos Avramidis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi for their thoughtful comments. A previous version of Chapter 6 was also presented at the Street Art and Urban Creativity Conference in Lisbon in 2016 and published in the Journal of Street Art and Urban Creativity as ‘A boneyard of data: Graffiti and street art’s temporalities’. My thanks again to Pedro and to the reviewers.
The museum studies programme at New York University, and INWARD and Sapienza University, Rome generously invited me to present early versions of the research. The School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne also provided material support for the project. Chris Healy, Audrey Yue, Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire and members of the Research Unit in Public Culture offered particular encouragement.
Many graffiti and street art colleagues have offered support over the life of this project: Andreas Mubi Brighenti, Kurt Iveson, Sabina Andron, Luana Kaderabek, Peter Bengtsen, Erik Hannerz, Malcolm Jacobson, Jacob Kimwall, Pedro Neves Suarez, Javier Abarca, Sam Merrill, Susan Hansen, Olly Walker, Chris Parkinson, Ron Kramer, Joe Isaac, Houda Lazrak, Martyn Reed, Evan Pricco, Milu Correch, Christian Omodeo, Martha Cooper, Dean Sunshine, Sandra Powell, Andrew King and many others. In particular, Alison Young has been a long-standing mentor, friend and collaborator.
Though I was fortunate to undertake fieldwork in Rome, London, Paris, Lisbon and San Francisco that shaped this study, Melbourne’s rich graffiti scene in the 1980s and 1990s and its street art explosion of the 2000s form an important backdrop. Thanks to the many Melbourne writers and street artists who have supported this study, particularly to those who gave permission to use images of their work.
Thanks also to the staff at Intellect for their work and support of the project, the three anonymous reviewers who offered astute and careful comments, Sarah Dunk for the map design and Ian Telfer for stellar proofreading and advice.
As always, Sean Whiting has been a keen supporter of this project.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
The Instagram Era
Looking at graffiti from a moving train takes practice. Depending on the proximity of nearby buildings and the speed of the carriage, passing walls are often just a blur. Eventually, your eyes adjust. As the train flits under bridges and through culverts, the eyeballs jitter from side to side, as if under the influence of a powerful drug, trying to freeze and focus an image. Graffiti murals painted along the train lines (known as ‘pieces’) or graffiti on the surface of the train itself (known as ‘panels’) are designed to attract attention, though each is different. Some pieces work best in an instant, conjuring a flash of recognition, while the letters of more complex ‘wild-style’ pieces are camouflaged, designed to repel your gaze.
This book traces the connections between graffiti, street art and the digital platform Instagram, beginning with the simple, intuitive observation that when turned on its side, the scrolling feed of Instagram images displayed on a mobile phone resemble graffiti viewed from the windows of a moving train (Figures 1 and 2). Both the experience of riding a metro system and of using Instagram on a mobile phone train the human apparatus to see in new ways, while also shaping forms of aesthetic and political expression.
Launched in 2010 as a modest mobile photo-sharing application for Apple’s iPhone that displayed images in a square format with filters that mimicked vintage photographs, Instagram has grown to become one of the world’s most-used social media platforms, alongside Facebook and Twitter. The reasons for this rise are complex, but include both ‘technical’ reasons, such as its ease of use on mobile devices and the limitations of other platforms in processing images efficiently and ‘aesthetic’ reasons: for example, a widespread preference for the clean, professional look of the filters and display, for the speed of viewing images instead of lengthy text or the availability of celebrity content. Eight years after its launch, Instagram has more than a billion users who have uploaded more than 40 billion images (Instagram website 2018). Through its ubiquity, Instagram has become not just a popular digital application but also a new cultural logic of the visual.
This book examines the rise of Instagram and its impact on visual culture by considering how it has shaped two inter-related and highly popular global forms: graffiti and street art. On Instagram, graffiti and street art are a common sight. The Instagram accounts of the world’s most famous street artists such as Banksy, JR, OSGEMEOS, Shepard Fairey and KAWS all exceed one million followers. I argue that Instagram’s privileging of flows of images tied to mobile devices and the real-time battles for impact and attention that this generates is more closely synced with the aesthetics of graffiti and street art and the needs of its producers and consumers than any other digital platform.
Fig. 1 A Melbourne train carriage, with windows resembling the square format of the early Instagram feed, complete with white borders and curved corners. Photo: Lachlan MacDowall.
Fig. 2 From inside, the train windows resemble a scrolling Instagram feed of graffiti. Photo: Lachlan MacDowall.
Contemporary graffiti and street art retain both the material messiness and ideological resonances of direct mark making in real urban spaces (Figure 9). However, they are also becoming increasingly digital forms, affecting more audiences in the digital realm, and becoming designed and shaped more directly for digital platforms, with the space of the street often transformed into a set or backdrop for the production of digital content. Of all digital platforms, the speed and scale of Instagram has amplified this process, putting pressure on artists to trade in Instagram’s ‘attention economy’ (Goldhaber 1997) and leaving significant challenges for researchers. In the Instagram Era, the quest for fame and notoriety that were part of graffiti’s roots in the working-class boroughs of New York takes on new forms and meanings.
Part One of this book sets out the context of the Instagram Era: the longer media histories that have shaped both graffiti and street art, since Brassaï began taking photographs of drawings and scratching in Parisian alleyways in the 1930s. As a largely ephemeral and geographically dispersed form, visual media have played a key role in the documenting and disseminating of graffiti, from the original New York Times newspaper article reporting the exploits of early taggers in July 1971 to web videos documenting contemporary train painting. This history demonstrates that graffiti and street art can be understood as both distinct cultural for