Social platforms build a visual representation of the self now more than ever before. Now, photography platform Wandering Bears aims to decode the phenomenon in a new exhibit
Generation Xers have long been preoccupied with building a digital self in tandem with their physical and emotional ones – updating profile pictures and bios as life progresses in real-time – but arguably it’s not until this virtual reflexivity is considered through the medium of photography that things start to get really interesting.
This, of course, is where Instagram comes along. The social media platform has presented an endlessly entertaining means of self-expression since it first emerged five years ago, and not only does it allow users to develop share their creative output with the world, becoming every young artist’s secret weapon in the process, but it also provides a nifty means of visual representation. In short, you are what you like.
One group eager to investigate this phenomenon further is Wandering Bears, an online community of emerging photographers and thinkers whose principal concern is collaboration. “We’re always trying to figure out how we can do something new with Instagram,” photographer and co-founder Luke Norman explains. “We use it as a platform to keep people updated with what we’re doing, but also to show new projects that we wouldn’t necessarily put out to the world otherwise.”
Norman, along with co-founders Nik Adam and Peter Haynes, came up with the idea of recording people’s likes quite a while back. “We selected 20 artists ranging from curators to photographers and editors of magazines, and we set up their Instagram accounts so that every time they liked an image it would then link to a corresponding Tumblr account,” Adam explains. This allowed the trio to record everything their chosen few had likes over a three or four week period. The results they got were as diverse as they were insightful.
“Some of the artists actually curated their likes, so they’ve maybe organised it by colour, or by objects,” Adam continues. “We have one photographer involved called Max Marshall, who runs a photoblog called Latent Image in America, and he really curated his. He would like massive groups of one item – a load of sunflowers, for example – and then move onto something else, so his is quite archival.” Others forgot about the concept altogether, liking as usual, and producing an equally interesting selection as a result. “Some people were really self aware, and some people weren’t.”
Each of the artists’ selections were printed on a long A3 size scroll for the exhibition, with lengths ranging from two and a half metres to six, which presented a curious new challenge when it came to the installation. “That has added an extra layer to the show: we scrunched some of them up, we wrapped one around a plinth to make it into a kind of sculptural piece. Others we’ve stuck to the floor, or hung from the roof, because we just didn’t know where else to put them, they’re so long.”
It's an undeniably innovative approach to curating an exhibition – compiling collections to create a kind of self-portraiture – and with the collaborators already part of the Wandering Bears community, it's sure to present fascinating results. We'd double tap.
Current Obsessions, curated by Wandering Bears in collaboration with Webber Represents, runs until December 18, 2015 at the Webber Gallery Space.
