Click to read Teju Cole’s article

In June of this year, Teju Cole, photography critic and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, wrote an article where he explored photographs on Instagram. The images he choose were image of public spaces and landmarks tourist often frequent. In his analysis, he found that many people tend to take images of the same thing, which is expected since everyone loves to document where they have been and with how easy it is to take photographs nowadays since we all carry a camera with us in our pockets (cell phones to the rescue), it is expected.

However, what he found in his analysis of these photographs is that nearly everyone took the images in the same way; same composition, same photo angle, and posted similarly. It could be that someone say somebody else take an image and the person wanted to recreate it? The chances of this happening with such frequency as the amount of photos present is very unlikely. To be able to create the same image over and over again, and all these attempts being done by completely different people makes me believe that everyone taking the same image is not a product of copycats, rather it is much more than that. Could it be that we all have a photographer inside of us that is able to frame the image the same way because it’s the most aesthetic? Maybe.

– J