pictures.of.me.in.places

a social media experiment

This was a social experiment, more accurately a social media experiment. The goal was to infiltrate the world of lifestyle travel photographers on Instagram. I wanted to see what the reaction to enigmatic images would be in this carefully crafted space.

Initial results were promising and the experiment is ongoing.

Here is how the experiment was structured. I would take images of people on vacations and remove any identifying features from them by blacking out any exposed skin or hair on all visible people in the images. I would then crop the images and post them to Instagram under the username pictures.of.me.in.places and add a very short very literal description. Then, following the advice of other travel lifestyle photographers, I would add hastags to the post via a comment and wait.

The posts were treated just like any other lifestyle travel photo post.  It was rather amazing.  No one in the initial 40 posts mentioned the blacked out people or the randomness of the imagery.

The experiment will continue in phase 2 where I will try and gain as many followers as possible.