Picture This

Ways of Seeing

I’m deleting my Instagram account. It is a major personal breakthrough.

When I started posting images all the way back in 2015, my daughter was four years old. It was a great way of processing the day and acted like a visual diary. This collage of my own making helped me to make sense of my world. I favoured considered shots of things I encountered. The higgledy-piggledy rooftops in Edinburgh, Morris Men with their costumes catching the wind, the studious charm of my daughter’s ballet class or a pile of her dolls almost animate, their wide eyes staring into the camera. I shared videos of records I’d bought, art exhibitions that moved me and the occasional night out.

There were some personal posts. I have cried as I’ve gone back and watched my little girl at her first sports day carrying an egg on a spoon with the utmost caution like it was a baby chick. Her T shirt too big and her black plimsolls taking careful steps. That was another world. Not the one we are living in now.

As I gained more followers, I became scared of boring them. I diversified into cultural insights. Quotes from films with pictures of actors. Fred Dibnah, the British steeplejack blowing up chimneys. Historic Flamenco dancers in action with their hands positioned perfectly. I spent time researching. It was a journey of discovery where my genuine enthusiasm for what I was sharing and what others were sharing with me, kept me coming back.

Steeplejack Fred Dibnah filmed by the BBC in 1970s

Not only a visual mood board, but Instagram also alluded to a way of connecting with like-minded people and during the many lockdowns of the pandemic I was thankful to have a virtual line of visual communication.

I freelance for clients in the cultural and third sector, and they rely on social media to build their brand and get their message out there. I actively support this in my actions. I know museums, start-ups and small businesses rely on Instagram like an extra pair of hands helping them to build a community.

There are, of course, huge problems. Namely Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who have been accused of meddling in politics on both sides of the Atlantic. If you want to delve into this, I suggest you subscribe to the brilliant Carole Cadwaller who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2020 and continues to highlight the dealings of the Broligarchy.

On a personal level, the ethics of Meta do not sit well with me. I trained as a journalist and studied media law and believe that publishing online regardless of the platform, should be guided by principles and laws. I am not for one moment naïve enough to believe that traditional media always play by the rules either, but they do at the very least, acknowledge them.

Aside from the ethics, my attention span is totally shot, and I can usually hyperfocus on a task, like a cat waiting to catch a mouse. When I scroll, as we are apt to do on Instagram, I am delivered horrific images of dead babies, covered in dust in Gaza followed by an influencer in various stages of undress. My head cannot cope with the brutalism and whimsy, which is all delivered in under a minute.

A lot of my thoughts about deleting Instagram, have stemmed from John Berger’s seminal work of 1972 Ways of Seeing. Here Berger uses art to illustrate that the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. He explores the difference between looking and seeing and how seeing informs language, perception, and gender roles.

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so, she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.¹

I would argue that with social media and the cult of turning the camera on to ourselves, we have all become the surveyor and the surveyed. Women even more so, and I cannot abide seeing my daughter (14) process this and the impact that it has had on a generation of young girls.

Berger also looks at publicity. Bearing in mind this work is 40 years old, the examples he uses are of more traditional media, but the principles he outlines are much the same.

In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently. In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.²

This visual imagery is no longer isolated to our cities, but lives in our phones glued to our hands, and we are regularly taking it to bed, to mealtimes and (for some, and yes, I do judge) to the toilet.

The contrast between publicity's interpretation of the world and the world's actual condition is a very stark one, and this sometimes becomes evident in the colour magazines which deal with news stories.³

Berger is keen to point out the difference in real life reportage and publicity imagery and how we read them. Publicity tends to focus on the aspirational future. He notes the jarring juxtaposition of them in the Sunday supplements.

And so, 40 years on, as we consume media on our phones, we are confronted with real life imagery of friends and family, publicity in its ever-sophisticated guises and news, all living on a virtual timeline ready for a doom scroll. My brain struggles to read this imagery together.

Having spent years in journalism and PR I have a reasonable understanding of how to read a picture. But what about our young people. If I am struggling what does a young brain, make of it all. They haven’t lived in a pre-social media era to be able to differentiate.

My addiction to my phone is borne out of the compulsion to see what’s going on through the portal of the Instagram app. It is not solely to blame but its power to suck me into the vortex and feed me a stream of consciousness has become a habit that I despise. I know that the habit can be easily replaced by another app, but the decision I am making is to be more considered about what is on my phone and the benefits it brings.

Now, because of all this, I have nowhere to share my images. The only social media account I currently have is Substack. In the spirit of John Berger, I am hoping to start a series called Picture This. Here we’ll share an image. The writer will unpick what the image means and spend time contemplating what we see. It may be a terrible idea, but let’s give it a go.

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What is the picture of?

It is of two young children. My first boyfriend Timothy, sometimes known as Timmy. My parents were friends with his parents, and they had two sons. Timothy was the youngest. They lived in the next town, which meant that we saw them regularly. It is at the back of our garden. We lived in a close and there was a path that ran around the backs so you could walk around without having to go on the road.

We’re holding hands because we’d agreed, I guess, that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. I like my outfit.

Why did you pick this picture?

I picked it because my mother and father were married when this was taken. They divorced by the time I was nine and had effectively separated when I was eight years old. There is a short period of time that I remember having a traditional family and this is probably at the height of that time. Things were not perfect, but they seemed relatively happy.

My mother looked after me and my youngest sister. My father worked at the Polytechnic in Manchester. They spent time as young couples did, making their home. We’d go to the park at the weekend or see friends. I remember my mum and dad having a fancy dress party and my father painted his face blue and went as Blue Peter (the name of a children’s television programme) and my mother borrowed my blackboard and satchel and went as Play School (the name of another children’s programme).

I would have just started primary school and I learnt to read on the stairs in this house. My mum taught me using a book about two pigs called Gay and Joy.

How do you feel when you look at this picture?

I remember my mother making ginger beer in the kitchen and wasps buzzing round. I feel a sadness for something that wasn’t to be. I wonder that if the path ahead had been different what kind of person I would be today.

On a return visit to Timothy’s house we got in his bunk bed, and he showed me his and I showed him mine. I remember we didn’t really see each other much after that, which is probably just a coincidence.

I don’t like the fact that he tucked his jumper into his trousers, it would never have worked out.

1, 2, 3, All quotes from Ways of Seeing by John Berger