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Social Media Is No Longer Part Of My Photography Journey

My Path To And Then Away From Instagram

8 min readOct 31, 2022

Dance Performance. By Josh S. Rose, 2022.

It’s more than just muscle memory that had my thumb reaching for the usual phone icons; for the inescapable worlds of social media. It was mental, psychological. I tried deleting the apps and only accessing through a browser, but too many times on the job someone wanted to connect on Instagram. Also, I often will use Instagram for tangible photography things: finding talent, finding a location, referencing an image. Eventually it did happen for me, though — I went from Instagram being my most-used app to among my least. Not through any behavioral “hack,” but in re-prioritizing my entire approach to my photography business.

But let’s back up and talk about how we got here to begin with.

Bixby Bridge. Photo by Josh S. Rose, 2004.

When digital photography emerged — not the first round, but when it became viable, professionally — I was all in. My photography journey began young, in my teen years. I had a photographer’s eye at an early age, but there was no chance of me becoming a professional. In my day, you needed to be in the right circles to get photography jobs. If you didn’t have someone to usher you in…

In total alignment.

One must decide if they want to be a photographer or an Instagrammer... and there is a distinct and very definable difference. Unless you devote a ton of time to IG, it is simply a place where work goes to die a long-tail death.

And…

Social media was fun for awhile. A good, long while.

Logging in now is an exercise in checking for comments. Looking to see if anyone left a comment on those photos I posted. Those photos that were posted with the idea that if I keep doing so…

Thank you for this. I am in a totally different stratosphere than you, in that I am just beginning to have people ask to buy some of my photos here and there. But I am about to embark upon building a website. I would love if you wrote an article about the ins and outs of that. What platform do you recommend?