As insurmountable as the social media algorithms often seem to me, occasionally I break through for a few moments and sense the craving beyond.
I started taking a lot of black and white photographs lately. If you are reading this post where I published it, on my blog, you may have noticed that each is accompanied by an often-unrelated black and white image. There is nothing particularly secret or hidden in the connection: I just like taking photos and was using the effort of writing here as a place to showcase some of my other (very human) work.
As I was taking all these photos it occurred to me that I should be sharing them with others besides the handful of readers on this (very new and very obscure) blog project: so I started a fresh Instagram account, gave it a silly name, and started uploading monochrome pics, including many of the ones you can see at the top of these posts.
Viral is the wrong word.
But there was certainly a gush of unprovoked interest in my photos.
Raw. Simple. Often just fuzzy macros of textures from my yard and neighbourhood, these pics are not works of art. But neither are they slop. They are intentional snaps and observations collected from micro-adventures by yours truly.
And people flocked, are flocking, seem to be continuing to flock to follow and like and comment on those pictures.
It was a side effort that spun off from the main effort that has become orders of magnitude more public than the original.
People, it seems, are craving, yearning, thirsting for something real and interesting.
This post was original posted on of poets & processors.