Japan - shot on 35mm film
Lately I’ve been thinking about what authenticity really means. Somewhere in the last decade, we shifted our online persona to be our truth, our “personal brand,” a crystalized and fragile presentation of ourselves that we purport to others as who we are. Because as the saying goes, even if you don’t care about a personal brand, you still have one. For some this could be a substack, a bluesky, or in my case, an Instagram account that I started in my early twenties to share my photography.
To say my Instagram account “persona” has given me a complex/amount of anxiety over the years would be an understatement. When my life invariably changed, and other things prioritized as they do, I felt - and still do - the pressure to persist this artistic portrait photographer persona I created in my early twenties in college. Partially because, as my creative output, it is a huge part of my identity still. Instagram has changed largely since I started (to the detriment of photographers), but, sharing my profile is usually solid answer to the question when I’m asked, “so what do you do?”
I have persisted being a photographer, however my subject matter has changed. A lot of work that I haven’t shared, like my videography I’m most proud of, sits defiantly in Adobe Premiere (a software I depise), because as many people can attest, life, a career, health, family, etc. come first. Or it’s something I had more mental bandwidth for in my twenties, when I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a multifaceted agency designer or go into UX design. Or maybe it’s because I was surrounded by in-person art communities, I don’t know.
All this to say - humans change, but brands do not. Once stuck in their niche, influencers can not deviate without facing consequence. I believe this is because capitalism has commodified our identities in the same way it transformed our whole food ecosystems to convenient, engineered, processed foods – for profit. AI is now doing the same, but for cognitive function, creativity, and emotional support. But we are human - not brands - and humans change, shift, evolve. Our built online identities are fragile, yet the world now treats them as though they’re permanent and unchangeable.
This begs the question: how might we allow for transformation under this rigid form of influencer capitalism/the attention economy? Is there room for fluidity? My hope is that as many people abandon the poor user experience of the for-profit, corporate internet for a more curated space like newsletters, personally hosted blog sites, and the larger indie web et. all, we can allow folks to have a more fluid and nuanced “identity.” That we can accept that people change, and that we shouldn’t feel guilty for this nor should we try to stop what is a natural human experience.