"What matters now is Instagram. It’s intoxicating. I’ve recently become hooked. It’s nectar for visual people, like having a poem in your pocket. Just the act of looking for Instagrammable pictures has opened my eyes more widely. I see all kinds of things I didn’t see before: from the big landscape to the tiny, intimate moment, it encourages a closer engagement with the world - tiny visual meditations throughout the day. It’s the perfect medium for ridiculously busy people who feel the urge to create and communicate, but need to do it on the run. For visualists, it is also the perfect way to check in on friends and keep up on them - no need to write the umpteenth email of the day!
It also raises the bar on what makes a good photograph, because there are so many good photographs on Instagram. It’s a reminder that photography is a weirdly democratic medium and that a photographer has to be incredibly disciplined about his craft. On the flipside, Instagram is so friendly and forgiving that anyone can post images without having to worry about whether they are great. This kind of loosening of restraints is surely good for the creative process, as can be seen in all those good Instagram photographs."
—Kathy Ryan, director of photography at the New York Times Magazine. Ryan is also editor of The New York Times Magazine Photographs [Aperture, 2011] [As quoted from Aperture 210, Spring 2013, p15].
@kathyryan1 on Instagram.
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