Tick Tock to Photography’s Day of Reckoning

What happens when we step out of the still image comfort zone?

Welcome to In the Flash, a reader-supported publication about intent and creativity in photography.

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I spent last week obsessively watching TikTok videos. That hardly makes me unique, except I am 43, a decade older than 80% of TikTok users, who range from 16-34. I am also a photographer, and we are vocal in our disdain for the platform. It’s simple. Photographers like photographs (“art”) and hate short vertical videos (“content”). Unfortunately for us, the vertical video format is infiltrating everything, including photographers’ last refuge, Instagram. There have been talks of a mass exodus from the app to other mythical spaces where photography reigns supreme and videos don’t exist. The few apps that came along to fill this niche have so far failed, unable to come close to Instagram’s massive reach.

I joined Instagram in 2014, four years after it was launched. Back then, the established photography world was in the midst of a painful transformation. Digital had already replaced film in the fast-paced editorial industry. While the old guard was still staunchly defending the darkroom romance of toxic chemicals, it was being supplanted by a new generation that had never worked with film (like me), hired by editors who wanted assignment images delivered the same day they were shot. Even as that shift was happening, film photography was lauded as a more authentic, honorable process. Digital, being cheaper and easier to learn, posed an existential threat to the art world as it promised to turn everyone into a photographer. Then came smartphones.

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Photographers were quick to denounce Instagram as the final death blow to the medium. Instagram became photography’s Mordor with headlines popping up in every major publication — “Instagram Is Cannibalizing Photography And No One Really Cares,” “Instagram is debasing real photography,” “Why Instagram is Terrible for Photographers...” The reasons were many. Photography was meant to be experienced in large formats, in the exclusive space of a gallery, an art book or a magazine — not in a democratized environment of a tiny phone screen. This mode of consumption, combined with the sheer proliferation of imagery, cheapened the idea of a photograph as a rare and precious object and reduced it to content. Worst of all, everyone on the platform fancied themselves a photographer. Professionals were scared. In 2012, a famous photographer told the New York Times, “There was a path (to a career), but there isn’t one anymore.” Things looked bleak. And that’s when I entered the industry.

At first, I was swayed by the fear-mongering and stayed away from the loathed app. But after vigorous soul-searching and months of hate-scrolling I gave in and made an account, instantly regretting not having done it sooner. Instagram was fabulous. Ideas that never saw the light of day could be explored within the safety of a playful space, emphasizing experiments and feedback over the final image. The open communication allowed for a conversation with people outside of my intimate circle and became a virtual drawing board for new concepts.

Fast forward to now, TikTok has become photography’s latest Doomsday Clock. Not just the app itself, but its nefarious influence on all social media. Instagram, which was at first hated because of the abundance of images is now hated because of its diminishing preference for them. The algorithm that emphasizes video reels has been proclaimed as the worst thing to happen to photography, yet again. To add insult to injury, a major publication that I work with has announced a shift to TikTok-style videos in the upcoming year, sending all of its photographers into yet another panic mode. So, are things really as bleak they seem?

To search for an answer, I entered a TikTok rabbit hole. The research started in a competent enough way with a comprehensive survey of the app’s photography accounts and rapidly deteriorated into hours of dancing, cats, makeup tutorials and food recipes. The voyeur in me rejoiced at catching glimpses of people’s habits, daily routines and living spaces in videos that felt like part-intimate confessions, part-informercials and part-music videos. After getting sucked into the TikTok vortex, it felt strange to come back to a one-dimensional space of my Instagram feed. All of a sudden, images were missing sound.

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The history of photography is a story of countless transformations with a single trajectory.  Every key milestone diminished the size and cost of equipment while increasing photography’s access and availability to the public. Each time, the art world declared Armageddon. The pandemic has galvanized the industry once more by creating a market for remote photography, which eliminated the need for equipment altogether, and by giving rise to TikTok. This last shift feels even more dramatic than the almost-magical shrinking of the camera, because instead of altering the process, it has the ability to change the format. In just a few years, TikTok has created a new, multi-sensory entertainment language that threatens to make traditional imagery obsolete.

Maybe.

Photography on TikTok chiefly consists of snappy tutorials and street portraits of fashionable young people taken by other fashionable young people. When I started plugging in names of my favorite photographers to see if they have a TikTok presence I came up with nothing but a handful of sleeper accounts. One of the few photographers I did find on TikTok is Alec Soth. His profile is adorned by a single phrase, “Rhymes with ‘both’” which made me realize I have never pronounced his name right. The rest of it unpacks Alec’s thoughts on photography, answers questions, and does little snippets behind the scenes exposing his equipment and studio. There are no photographs there at all.

This exposes the conundrum of TikTok. The vertical video that is destroying photography’s hegemony on social media doesn’t leave much room for still images. There is no major stampede of professionals to TikTok because we have no idea what to do with it. In retrospect, we should have been prepared. Almost 20 years ago, Brian Storm formed MediaStorm and championed a new way of documentary storytelling that was an uncanny precursor to the TikTok format. He worked with the world’s top photojournalists to create multimedia pieces that combined photographs with video, voice-overs, maps, text and music. Ed Kashi, Jonathan Torgovnik and Jessica Dimmock created powerful pieces that promised to pave the way for a revolution in photography. Then, inexplicably, the trend died down.

At the same time as the thirst for TikTok content is growing, there is a gaping hole in documentary photography that exists on the app. The luddite in me rejoiced at this, but the speculator saw an opportunity and made an account. I remembered being fascinated by Ed Kashi’s wonderful piece on Kurdistan but never having the courage to experiment with multimedia. Maybe, this is the time.

In 2016, Brian Storm was interviewed by Musee Magazine, “You want to make it easy for people to consume the information that you're putting together. I think the evolution of the design experience is just starting to happen... the future is going to continue to surprise us... I remain hopeful that still photographers will add video and audio to their storytelling process.” The photograph as an object will carry on, but as Gen Z grows up sharing the new language of TikTok, our way to tell stories is certain to undergo a metamorphosis.

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Everything about doing a TikTok post is overwhelming, from learning video, to showing my face, to understanding what content to contribute. If I do work up the courage, the first post will be cringey, followed by a panic attack and a bottle of wine. But the discomfort I feel at the thought of succumbing to TikTok tells me it’s worth the attempt. I am curious to explore this new frontier because the worst thing that can happen is a miserable failure, and I will take that over being left behind in cozy stagnation anytime.

A link to my nascent TikTok account

Here are a few photographers that I found on TikTok so far.

Alec Soth

Ami Vitale

Massimo Vitali

Paolo Verzone

Daniela Zalcman

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Find me on Instagram @dina_litovsky