AnOther speaks exclusively to Alister Mackie about his striking series of colour-themed images on Instagram...
Speed, ease and the satisfaction of putting your image through a filter are the three main appeals of instagram, one of the three most popular social networking tools of the moment. As such, it is not surprising that It has already attracted the attention of some of the industry's influential image-makers such as photographer Nick Knight, hair stylist Sam McKnight and Another Man creative director Alister Mackie. What is most interesting about these users is their penchant for theming content – such as Knight's regular updates of delicate roses plucked from his Richmond garden. The increasing popularity of instagram has meant that to stand out on a feed of ubiquitous food, feet and cat shots, one needs to curate.
"All the images are telling a similar story even though they're quite random, it's the colour that makes it work as one page"
Mackie caught AnOther's attention last week when he released a selection of striking colour themed images. "The colour pages are actually just a screen grab of the previous nine images on my instagram", he explains. "When I started I had so many images it felt natural to sequence them by colour. It was a fun way to arrange the images I had – they then gave me a direction to add new ones. I think we always want to arrange object and images by colour. All the images are telling a similar story even though they're quite random, it's the colour that makes it work as one page. I always think it's beautiful to have loads of tones of one colour, even now I'm obsessed with paint charts or the fabric colour cards we use at work when consulting for Marc Jacobs or Louis Vuitton. There we use vast books of hand dyed swatches but a nice digital version is the MyPANTONE app on iPhone."
Text by Laura Bradley
