Don’t Let Social Media Steal Your Artistic Joy
Social media is fake and performative. Your life is real.
I wanted your life. Or, perhaps to be more specific, I wanted your time. And maybe some of your money.
I scanned your Instagram stories and watched as you swanned in and out of shops, buying bouquets of flowers, vintage linens, and props for your latest photo shoot. Designers sent you cotton dresses, and you tied silk scarves in your hair. Often, you were bare-mouthed. Sometimes, you wore red lipstick.
You were in France for a year because it was a dream of yours, and you’re the kind of person whose dreams always seem to come true, so effortlessly, so easily. You’re a photographer and your pictures had become good, astonishingly good, because you had the privilege of time. You spent hours studying photography and French surrealists — I knew this because your feed was flooded with the minutiae of your day — and your work, once a string of hyper-stylized photographed fashion and finery, took on a depth and poise that was wholly your own. Your subject was your body — more specifically, you.
Over the course of a year, you pared yourself down to bone, and was beautiful, though mostly painful, for me to watch.
