My wife and I use Instagram, Facebook, and all the major social media as a tool to lay out to anyone who uses those platforms so we can display our work. That’s about as far as our involvement goes. We’ve seen others use social media in a more active way and they say they are successful, but quite honestly we don’t believe the hype, and social media is not part of who we are.

For example… a while back, during the time when I flat out refused to use IG, Myesha started an account only to find that she could only post in square format and only from a cell phone. Also it automatically linked to her Facebook account and transmitted to all of her friends that she had a new IG account, so they all immediately followed her. Frustration ensued, and about an hour later she deleted her IG account because of all the frivolous work to fit in the IG world. It was comical.

Fast forward a couple months to when we decided to put ourselves on ig as a duo. She had already remade an ig account for herself and started a small following. When I opened the ig account for Callahan Freet I took some time to find a few people to follow, we gained a small following, I liked some random images, etc etc etc. What followed was our very rapid devolvement back to being disgruntled with social media…

Consider social media as a bridge to the real world – not as an end in itself.

It’s just so empty! reading Eric Kim’s blog post about his experience is highly recommended because he uses a lot more words to describe exactly what we hate about social media. It’s all fake and pointless. Myesha and I have thankfully kept a level head about expectations, realizing what FB and ig really are for (un-seriousness), which is why we use it only as a passive catalog for people to view. We’ve always had the opinion that face time is the best communication method; eric also comments the same in an earlier, less disgruntled blog post (for the record, we agree):

I think at the end of the day, nothing beats face-to-face interpersonal communication. You can't convey facial expressions, hand gestures, and subtleties of intonation of voice in a 140-character tweet…

See the image above and soak it in because it represents everything we cannot stand about social media. There are tons of these, representing the lack of creativity in an effort to get followers and likes. That’s the motivation here. And for what reason? Do you think these people give a darn about creating an unforgettable image? Heck no, if they did they wouldn’t be copying so blatantly. We think it’s just brainless and devoid of soul. Could you imaging edward weston reaching out and showing his arm in his grass against sea, or adams doing the same in one of his images? (no!)