Deb JJ
Lee built a career in illustration on
Instagram, one colorful comic at a time.
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Some of the comics
that Lee, 26, posted on the photo-sharing site told stories about fantastical
worlds; others meditated on Lee’s experiences as a
Korean American. Without
Instagram, Lee would not be illustrating graphic novels and publishing picture
books.
But seven years,
hundreds of posts and tens of thousands of followers later, Lee’s relationship
with Instagram has cooled, because the app has changed so much that it seems to
have stopped welcoming artists. The changes, Lee said, have “been nothing short
of harmful to artists, especially those who make still images.”
Instagram was
founded in 2010 as a photo-sharing site where people could post, curate and
showcase snapshots from their lives. It became a destination for an endless
variety of beautiful, funky, far-out, and vibrant images — of food, national
parks, and everything else — turning into one of the internet’s premier visual
repositories.
But Instagram,
which is owned by Meta, has in recent years increasingly shifted toward video.
It has introduced Reels, short videos meant to compete with the video-sharing
app
TikTok, and it has launched features to encourage people to make videos
together. Its algorithms appear to favor videos over photos. Last year, Adam
Mosseri, Instagram’s head, said the site was “no longer a photo-sharing app.”
That has caused
angst among many Instagram users, who have relied on the app to share photos,
illustrations, comics, and other still images with friends and followers. In
July, after Instagram introduced updates to mimic TikTok’s video features,
celebrities such as Kylie Jenner and others rebelled, declaring an intent to
“make Instagram Instagram again.” The backlash was so intense that Instagram
temporarily reversed the changes.
(Photo: Unsplash)
For artists who
make a living through Instagram, the platform’s move toward video is more of an
existential threat. Many of these artists are photographers, illustrators, or
graphic novelists whose work does not easily translate to video. More and more,
they are finding that audiences on Instagram are not seeing their posts, their
growth on the platform is stagnating and their reach is shrinking.
Some young artists
who might have gotten their starts on Instagram are now venturing to
membership-based photo-sharing apps such as VSCO and Glass. Others are
exploring professionally oriented platforms including Behance and LinkedIn or
other social media apps such as Twitter and TikTok.
In a statement,
Meta said it cared “deeply about all creators, including artists.” The
Silicon Valley company, which is trying to lure content creators away from rivals
YouTube and TikTok, has invited some artists to join its programs that pay
influencers for using its products.
But Lee, who was
recently invited by Instagram to earn a bonus for posting Reels, said the
incentives were “even less reliable than freelance illustration.”
Maddy Mueller, 25,
who illustrates infographics and paints backgrounds for animation, knew that
she would have to market herself through social media after she graduated from
a university in 2019. She joined Instagram to post her work.
But trying to
attract attention to her art on the app soon became “an uphill battle” against
the algorithm, she said. Mueller said she often felt that the number of
hashtags on a post, or the time when it had been uploaded, mattered more than
the actual content of the post.
To gain exposure
for her work on Instagram, she began animating her paintings that were meant to
be still — so that her posts would be treated as videos. Promoting her art
meant less time to make it, she said.
Last year,
Mueller, who lives in St. Louis, started focusing instead on Twitter, where she
discovered a burgeoning community of artists. She was invited to illustrate
zines, joined private Discord groups that shared professional opportunities,
and increased her following through hashtag events, in which artists tweeted
and shared content with tags such as
#PortfolioDay and #VisibleWomen.
Mueller now has
nearly 5,000 followers on Twitter, compared with about 1,000 on Instagram.
Once she had
experienced Twitter’s community and growth, she said, “I basically almost gave
up on Instagram.”
The changes have
also made Instagram a more challenging place to find illustrators to hire, said
Chad Beckerman, an art director, and agent at the CAT Agency, which represents
children’s book illustrators. It had once been easy to search the app for
illustrators and view their work, he said, but the platform was now congested
with irrelevant posts, Reels, and Stories, a feature that people use to post
photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours.
The algorithm “is not
going after quality,” Beckerman said. “I don’t think the algorithm is even
caring about what the person’s work looks like.”
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