The Desperation of the Instagram Photo Dump
On August 31st, Jennifer Lopez posted sixteen pictures for her two hundred and fifty-one million followers on Instagram, under the gnomic caption “Oh, it was a summer.” Coming in the wake of a very public divorce filing, which ended her much tabloided two-year reunion with Ben Affleck, the images evinced an attitude of whimsical insouciance: there were mirror selfies alongside a scene of folded laundry, a picture of her child’s Super Mario backpack, and a slide of black text on a white background declaring, “Everything is unfolding in divine order.” Compared to J. Lo’s previous Instagram posts, which tended toward slim selections of professional photographs and video clips from runway shows, the new photos looked like intimate and improvised products from her own phone camera. Over all, the album might as well have been a slightly unwieldy update from a non-famous friend going through some relationship trouble. (Stars: they post just like us.)
Recently, on Instagram, this excess is by design. In early August, the platform doubled the maximum number of photos allowed in users’ carrousels, from ten to twenty per post, enabling the sort of sprawling so-called photo dumps that would once have felt anathema to the platform’s aura of careful curation. Today’s Instagrammer no longer chooses one representative photo at a time, creating a grid of images just so; instead, users, especially those belonging to Gen Z, are putting up faux-messy but actually carefully selected compendia showcasing the detritus of their lives.
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