Instagrammar

is a vehicle to nurture new curatorial voices using #Instagram’s archival material for critical thinking. Curators under 35 will be invited to develop their arguments using rich media material. The essays will focus on bodies of works produced specifically for Instagram either as social observation or art experiment. The bios will be kept close to the length of a tweet [280 words].

Context

September 25, 2018, the co-founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, 34, and Mike Krieger, 32, resign from Facebook after six years at the tech giant, resulting in massive profits. Between 2012 and 2017, the company went from 30 million users and zero revenues to 600 million users and a multi-billion-dollar ad business [source: Recode]. What will become of the open source platform with its now one billion monthly users that have generated more than 20 billion images? The wealth and future of Instagram might reside in the analysis, in the deconstruction of its authored and user-based content.

Introduction

For our Instagrammar debut, curator Sarah Aucagos introduces the work of urban anthropologist Jeff Mermelstein and Magnum documentary photographer Matt Black. Using Instagram as the primary platform for their investigative material, Mermelstein and Black operate on different scales and in different territories; both are methodical chroniclers of America today. Black documents hands harvesting crops for a few bucks, Mermelstein zooms in on screens held tight by hands with painted nails.

In New York, Jeff Mermelstein peers over subway commuters’ shoulders to bring back the dramatic and the mundane of their screen conversations: ‘The shower curtain is getting pretty dirty’; ‘A doctor tried to put me on three drugs / And told me I’m bipolar…’/ ‘Damn. Dick is the perfect name for him’ / ‘She likes ruff sex’. The photographer’s expanding database made of overblown pixels and unfiltered text exchanges is an intrusive anthropop collection on human behaviors, while carefully preserving people’s anonymity.

Matt Black uses Instagram for his elegiac, black-inked mapping of today’s Geography of Poverty. A piece of Beat Photography, it stages on Instagram for its map and audience reach, pairing geotagged photographs with census data. Like Zachari Caneperi co-director of the Netflix series, Flint Town, who spoke about the ‘infrastructure of poverty in America’, Black exposes the haunting evidence of this apparatus throughout the country.

Rural, Urban, Digital
Documenting the Real for Instagram
By Sarah Aucagos

From urban to rural, print to digital, portrait to macro, street photography always thrives by its honesty. Jeff Mermelstein and Matt Black document today’s complex American society in its kaleidoscopic contractions. One tames buzzing New York, the other highlights muted rural populations. Both use every day America as a creative canvas for endless creative experiments; one is using a palette of pixels and color photography, the other operates in high contrasted black and white.

mattblack_blackmattGary, IN. Plywood sign. Gary has a population of 80,294 and 38.7% live below the poverty level. "O the man who works, the man who sweats, the man who pounds and rolls the iron, who plows the fields, and sows the grain and reaps the golden harvest, the clerk, the student, the school teacher, the mechanic, the laborer, in fact to the millions of toiling men and women of the earth, who hope to rest their weary bodies in the great afternoon of life on something better than blasted hopes and vain regrets, this book is dedicated.” The Story of Gary. Indiana. [The Harries Company, 1908].

jeffmermelstein#nyc

Jeff Mermelstein has captured the importance of our interactive social communication. From his street photography capturing people’s body language to people’s digital language, the page @jeffmermelstein is a direct witness of the digital generation. From subway commuters to people queuing, Mermelstein is never far away, always ready to snap. His phone is a constant channel for social commentary. The photographer conjures up ordinary people’s portraits in the frame of their own smartphones. This highly addictive, seemingly indispensable tool has made its users less happy but built its own language.

Jeff Mermelstein provides a glimpse into the digital intimacy of New Yorkers who are oblivious to his presence. It is an act that places the Instagram viewer, like Mermelstein himself, into the role of a voyeur.

On Instagram, author and viewer scrutinize carefully the slices of ‘stolen’ conversations. Details of everyday life are revealed; at times juicy, at times disturbing. Street photography is remastered here; its always acute sense of observation tinged with humor.

jeffmermelstein#nyc

Geography of Poverty is a seminal piece of social, interactive documentary in its usage of geotagged photography paired with data census for a social media target audience.

Californian-born Matt Black builds an Instagram account of his own version of America, the America of marginalized communities. A blog on Magnum Photos, introduces the project.

“Matt Black deconstructs the myth of America as a land of opportunity, finding that poverty is deeply woven into the fabric of society. Since 2014, the work has taken him on four cross-country trips over 80,000 miles, photographing communities in 46 states.

‘It could have just as easily been called The Geography of Power,’ Black says, soon after returning from his fourth trip, which lasted nine months. ‘It’s something much more complicated than economics; it’s about social power. Who gets their needs met and who doesn’t?”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 12.7% of Americans — or 40 million people — live in poverty.

To Black, poverty is not really a question of economics but a lived experience of power.

How do you make visible something ingrained in the very fabric of our society?

“46 million people living in poverty in the U.S. since year 2000. The number of people living in communities of concentrated poverty has doubled,” Black states in a YT video post by the Pulitzer Center.

From epicenter of rural California, Black enriches his photographic essay with maps allowing his 288,000 followers to trace his journey. His field-based investigations paired with data journalism build evidence of endemic poverty at a social scale that debunks most pre-conceived ideas. Poverty is not operating in isolated, fragmented and disconnected zones in America but ingrained in the very roots of the country.

On his Instagram account, Black shares his journey with a red line on a map and directly addresses his audience:
Map fig. 1: This marks the end of my fourth cross-country trip for my project The Geography of Poverty, which now covers 88,000 miles across 46 states. Thank you for following along. Please watch here for new work.

Map fig. 2: Thank you for joining me as I completed this latest chapter in the Geography of Poverty. I have visited and photographed over a hundred cities across 39 states so far. Poverty in America is often portrayed as something that is isolated, fragmented and disconnected: an aberration, in other words. In fact, all of the communities I have photographed are deeply connected and intertwined. Watch here for more of this work soon.

Buffalo, NY. Shuttered train terminal. Buffalo is a city in Erie County, New York. The population is 261,310 and 30.7% live below the poverty level. Credit: Matt Black, #geographyofpoverty, @mattblack_blackmatt

“Paris is far more beautiful than New York but I like New York better because there is a kind of craziness and a neurosis in the air, and there is the angst; there is a temperament on the street,” Jeff Mermelstein said in a video posted by Media Matters in 2007. His impressive career and numerous rewards can only command respect. However, it’s his ability to extract touching intimacy from the banal that makes his body of work so fascinating. From the New York of the 1990s, Mermelstein has accumulated street scenes with a piercing eye for detail, a witty tenderness for human idiosyncrasies and at times, a tendency for gruesome compositions. Art critic, Max Kozloff, calls him “an absurdist with a sense of humor.”

Series of mouths: fig. 1, fig. 2, fig. 3, fig. 4 and duos fig. 1, fig. 2, fig. 3, fig. 4, fig. 5, fig. 6, fig. 7, fig. 8

And New York Times photo editor Kathy Ryan talks about his “very distinctive pictures. There is nothing posed about them, everything about them is very much in the moment, very much heavy with a certain kind of attitude”.

September 11 through Jeff Mermelstein’s Eyes
Jeff Mermelstein, Tree and Skeleton of Tower Two, from Ground Zero, September 11, 2001

jeffmermelstein #newjersey

“For me 9/11 was a continuum of my endeavors on the street; with one great twist, and that great twist was this extraordinary tragedy of that day. All the same gears, all the same mechanics of my camera were the same... and here is this to deal with the camera... here take this... take this...”. The tragedy took place in Jeff Mermelstein’s city, the everyday playground of his choosing. He knew he was making history. He shot and shot and shot “more and more films” ––seventeen rolls, until 7pm when he went home. He said, “I was a war photographer for one day”. Kathy Ryan speaks of the spirituality of Jeff’s images that day. Jeff Mermelstein, video Media Matters (Part II).

More than a decade later, the Leica films are replaced by a smartphone. Mermelstein’s practice remains unchanged. New York is still the central stage. What has changed with the birth of Instagram is his angle of view. In Jeff Mermelstein is a F***ing Anthropologist, Frank Multari, a millennial photographer member of @nycspc [NYC Street Photography Collective], speaks of Mermelstein in these terms: “The most talented people working in the genre today are missing something fundamental about life on the streets of the 21st century, and Jeff Mermelstein is the only one who’s found it.”

By using a screen to capture a screen, Mermelstein suggests that the most relevant camera today is the one that shares. Only fingers and the smartphone screen are shown –– the user isn’t in the picture. Here anonymity is preserved, either that or the identity of the user is simply not the point he wants to make. A question for Jeff? Q1 Jeff.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnfd0rLF3uM/?hl=fr&taken-by=jeffmermelstein

Once shared on Instagram, the image triggers instant comments. The ‘voyeur’ turns his interactive audience into ‘voyeurs’. The language used by commentators –– often short sentences replete with superlatives and emoji; is itself fodder for future academic analysis.

When producers and commentators join together in this digital journey, what differences are there in the perception of their journeys? What impact does an artist’s social observation have on the active viewers? How will devices and platforms that are primarily designed for instant gratification influence the understanding of the physical world that the storyteller has intentionally engaged with?

It is these type of questions we wish to ask Jeff Mermelstein and Matt Black simultaneously.

Matt Black in The Geography of Poverty has challenged Instagram’s typical audience by resisting the aesthetic diktats of Instagram. He instead portrays a community that is left behind by technology and all that Silicon Valley promises. His documentary-poem details the daily grind of California’s forgotten population, the one which facelessly sows and harvests in dire conditions for a few dimes.

Each of his thumbnails draws poverty through the lens of childhood, old age, family, authority, racism, disease or death. The captions pairing facts and quotes speak for themselves, offering a more textured examination of humanity beyond the iconography associated with poverty.

mattblack_blackmatt, Cedar City, UT. “I've seen the way it is slowly progressing downhill, to where it seems more comfortable for the government to simply support the poor people rather than giving them opportunities, because they will have to raise middle income, and that’s where it’s supposed to be at. So it’s disappearing, so the rich can get richer.” Cedar City is a town in Iron County, Utah. The population is 28,857 and 22.3% live below the poverty level. #geographyofpoverty

mattblack_blackmatt, Baltimore, MD. Sandtown. "I saw Freddie Gray being arrested. He was right there. He kept saying ‘Why you breaking my leg?’ It wasn't about race. It was about authority." Baltimore is a city in Maryland. The population is 620,961 and 23.8% live below the poverty level. "If the same stuff is going on across the country, it's coming from leadership. It come from the top to the bottom". #geographyofpoverty
mattblack_blackmatt, Burlington, VT. "They think I am stealing something because I have two kids and a stroller. If you get mad you are just giving them more reason to discriminate against you." Burlington is a city in Chittenden County, Vermont. The population is 42,417 and 25.1% live below the poverty level. "You just got to keep calm and suck it up". #geographyofpoverty
Matt Black walks in the footsteps of photojournalists of great ethical stature such as Eugene Richard currently exhibiting at ICP Museum. Both are compelled to represent the America of those left behind and shut out. Their respective projects reveal the outcasts, the illegal immigrants, the people suffering diseases and addictions, the victims of racism or war traumas.
"This is all races, all ethnicities, all cultures, all histories, all geographies throughout,” Matt Black states.
Through Black’s work on Instagram, the photographic documentary preserves its role of social anthropology, now with an anchor in the digital world. Will it be altered by the digital experience through which it is accessed? Will its content bring us closer to its plea?
Sarah Aucagos
Bio: “Global citizen with a passion for visual arts, art criticism, and gastronomy.”
Translated by Claudine Boeglin