The Art of Cat and Mouse

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a shift in the social media family.

Every once in a while, Meta decides to alter the algorithm, reboot the hive mind, and contact the mothership, and the whole of the Instagram community sees a dip in engagement. Usually, the dip lasts for a few days, and a couple of “oof, this post didn’t do wells” later, everything returns to normal. These last few weeks though, things seem different. More of the artists I follow are posting about a lack of engagement in conjunction with a general malaise regarding their own work. It’s almost as if this current dip in engagement has somehow tainted the creative process and that people are having a genuine existential crisis about their creative process. Or maybe I’m just projecting.     

Back in 2015, I uploaded my first photograph to Instagram. The photo was of a tiny mouse hiding in the grass on the boulevard beside my apartment building. It received 9 likes and 1 comment. I was elated by the thought that a handful of people had taken the time to view my photo. Looking at the metrics of that first post, I thought that if I could reach double digit likes, I’d be doing something right. My third post, a black and white photo of my cat sleeping, reached 10 likes. I was ecstatic.

I spent the next few weeks agonizing over other people’s photos, trying to figure out how I could get more engagement out of images of everything from fence posts to guitar strings. I devoted hours to editing snapshots in app, using Instagram’s filters to over-saturate cloudy skies and make strangers on the street seem moody. Much to my chagrin, my posts averaged 3 to 9 likes and rarely received a comment.

After months of posting travel photos, my account began to grow at a glacial pace. I sold my first print in the summer of 2016, an image of a diving whale from the west coast of Canada, and I watched as double-digit likes became a regularity. The future seemed bright, and social media was lighting the way forward.  

I could keep writing this blog post telling you about the hard work that I put into growing my account, and how that hard work eventually blossomed into a garden of delights, but that would be disingenuous. I’ve spent years pouring my heart and soul into social media growth and in 2024, almost a decade after my first Instagram post, I have made meager strides forward. My double-digit like obsession is now a triple-digit expectation, and comment counting has been replaced by follower monitoring. Growth has led less to any tangible form of success and more to a serotonin stealing game of cat and mouse with AI algorithms that I still don’t fully comprehend.   

What I can tell you, with certainty, is that my anxiety surrounding social media posting eventually became so bad that I would melt down to tears, often fighting with my wife over edits I asked her to make. I remember falling into a deep depression after a post of a leopard from South Africa didn’t break sixty likes and quitting Instagram for four months at the end of 2021 when the toll it was taking on my mental health became so bad that my self-talk was bordering on abuse (I took two of my best-selling photos during that break).

Fast forward to the present day as a full-time wildlife photographer, and most of my days are so bitterly lonely that I move between working furiously and mute melancholy like a yo-yo. More days than not, I hate my photography and wonder if I should quit before I embarrass myself, all while spending so much time monitoring my business accounts on Instagram and Facebook that the joints in my hands hurt from holding my phone.

But here’s the thing: I love photography, and I’m guessing if you post regularly to a photography based social media account, you do too. I have never been so lost in the flow of creativity as when I am photographing an animal in the wild, and editing the perfect shot to share with my friends, family, and followers is sublime. I was miserable in a traditional job setting and, while my fears of failure can lead to depressive lows, the highs I feel when I connect with someone over my work are unparalleled. The problem, I feel, is not social media as a construct, but rather social media as a way of being.

Facebook and Instagram are nothing more than connective tissue. They are the ligaments and cartilage that help the body of your work move through space and time into the hearts and minds of people across the planet. But, as important as connective tissue is to movement, it is not representative of the whole of your being. The spirit, the essence of who you are, and the art you make, is far more significant than the skeleton on which you ride. Don’t get me wrong, social media is impactful. It can shape how you take photos, connect you to mentors, and change the course of your career. It is on social media, after all, that many of the interactions I cherish take shape. Social media can mean many, many things to many different people, but social media is not your art, it is the gallery wall on which you hang it...and it is a poor gallery at that.

Now, regardless of whether you’ve ever had your work in a gallery space, imagine for a moment that a photograph you have taken is hanging in an exhibition along with the work of several other photographers. When you go to the gallery you see your work, as well as the work of others, and you can connect with other artists and watch as gallery attendees interact with your photograph. You get inspired and when you leave the gallery, you feel excited to explore your creativity and try new things.

Now imagine that the gallery hires someone to stand beside your photo and count how many times someone looks at it, how long they look at it, and whether they say positive or negative things about your work. Then, every few minutes, the gallery moves the photographs on display around the gallery based on whether or not the data recorded for your photo is better or worse than the data for other photos. After a few weeks of this, you start to hear from friends who say when they go to the gallery, they can’t find your work and that the gallery has hidden some work from the public all together. You run down to the gallery yourself and quickly realize that the photos closest to the gallery entrance are getting preferential treatment and that some artists are paying the gallery to keep their photos near the door. You also realize some artists are putting on performances in front of their photos, and others have installed televisions beside their work that show random clips to grab people’s attention.

You panic. You want people to see your work, so you start skipping creative time to go to the gallery more and more, replacing your photograph with new images that look like the most popular images in the gallery in the hopes your work will be seen. You also spend more and more time inventing ways to get people to look at your work and spend hours monitoring video feeds of gallery attendees walking past your photograph. Eventually, of course, you realize that the gallery is both ineffective and demoralizing, pitting artists and attendees against each other, so you pull your work out of the gallery and warn all of your friends to stay away.   

Now, obviously this little cautionary tale is an oversimplification of social media today, but the premise still rings true. The questions that have been rattling around in my head over the last few weeks are filtered through the idea that social media is much like any business or artistic relationship (albeit a seemingly toxic one). If I view social media as the equivalent of a toxic relationship, how can I maintain that relationship without letting it consume, or harm, me and how do I create healthy boundaries that allow me to flourish within that relationship if I deem it beneficial despite its toxicity?

There are many benefits that come from social media when it is used as a facilitator between your work and those you want to see your work. What I have been seeing more and more of lately, both in myself and others, is that social media has become THE work. Social media has become an embodiment of what it means to be a successful photographer, rather than a place where photographers share their successes. I’m not yet sure how to answer the questions I have posed, but I do know that in the novel of my career as a photographer, I don’t want social media to be the titular chapters.