To thumb through Instagram is to parse a wide and often unpredictable range of emotions. Things can be sensational (Beyoncé's Instagram account), harrowing and uplifting, all at once (the Humans of New York feed), or kinda raunchy (The Fat Jew). But it is always, unconditionally, digital.
Except for next week: For ten days, for free, anyone in New York can take a screen-free tour of Instagram. The company's editorial division is exhibiting at Photoville, where a string of shipping containers will decorate Brooklyn Bridge Park from September 18 to 28. Two of those will host Instagram's exhibits, The Everyday Projects and Here in the World: Voices of Instagram, a survey of different creative types that have appeared on Instagram's blog.
The Everyday Projects began in 2012 when photographer Peter DiCampo and journalist Austin Merrill were working in West Africa. They saw a side of life often left out of the usual visual narrative. “Western journalists are often only sent in times of crisis, so the images from media in the news are full of despair, and perhaps they miss out on some of the beauty and the normal everyday life that happens in between,” says Pamela Chen, editorial director at Instagram. Her job includes keeping tabs on the artists and photographers leveraging Instagram for creative uses, and she calls the "everyday" movement a "unique Instagram phenomenon," because after @everydayafrica gained traction, feeds started appearing for dozens of other countries. There's @everydayiran, @everydayasia, and @everydayjamaica, to name a few. Sixty-five photos from ten of those feeds will appear at Photoville.
This is the first time Instagram has dabbled with a gallery show, so naturally "it's the first time that these have been exhibited side by side, and the first time that they’ve met each other," Chen says. "So a community was created online, and now it’s coming together in real life."
To really drive that IRL-ness home, Chen and her team installed a large scale, analog photo feed in one of the shipping containers. Instead of thumb-swiping upwards, visitors will use a lever to manually crank a stream of two-feet-tall photos. Each comes with the signage and descriptions you'd get in the app, so users can figure out whom to follow once they've left Photoville.
