Dan Turkel

An Instagram Project

I love photography. I think it’s such an incredible medium for creating and sharing a moment, or a person, or a world. It has the power to capture, shift, and fabricate entirely. I love the dark, sensuous worlds of Bill Henson, the muted moments of Garmonique, and the mysterious rainbows of Brice Bischoff’s caves. But something always irked me about Instagram.

Admittedly, something still does irk me about Instagram. I think the filters, while extremely well executed for what they are, often are used to excuse lazy composition under the mindset that a cool filter will fix a bad photo. Worse yet, filters seemed to be applied willy-nilly for the sake of it, or out of some sort of nostalgia for the quirks, personality, and happy accidents of film photography, but something struck me as false, affected, or silly about all that. As a photo lover and an amateur photographer, I couldn’t help but turn my nose up and avoid the service.

But I caved. Three times actually. Apparently at some point (I genuinely don’t recall) I made an account called daturkel, but I deactivated it and it’s now permanently removed from the namespace. Same story with dtfaces, which was just close-up photos of my friends faces. Then I made dtrkl.

My motivation was multiple. For one, a number of my friends were creating some really inspiring and beautiful content that I wanted access to. But I also knew that I had something to say, and that I wanted to broadcast photographically, and no excuse I had for avoiding Instagram was rooted in anything but a silly snobbishness that didn’t hold up under my own scrutiny.

But I didn’t want to have just some filtered-photos-of-food account. In fact, I resolved never to use a filter at all (nor to use the #nofilter hashtag, because I think that’s silly). I wanted to create provocative and emotional photographs that spoke to people and got reactions, but I was concerned that the limitations of my phone’s camera would harm my ability to create beautiful images. I have always had naturally shaky hands and my phone has no image-stabilization, thus everything looks blurry or washy. But I had an idea; I took two photos of my jeans:

Looking back, the first of the two isn’t nearly as interesting as some of the photos in my project would turn out, but the idea was cemented in my head: a modest phone-camera didn’t have to mean ugly blurry photos, it could mean beautiful out-of-focus images.

The distinction of out-of-focus, not blurry, was and is important to me and comes up just about every time someone sees my Instagram account. “Why are all your photos blurry?” I don’t think they are blurry, not that it would matter (there are so many beautiful blurry photos—some give a feeling of chaos, others demonstrate motion, others let light dance around the image). Instead, I just bring my phone lens close enough to the subjects that it can’t focus at all. (The ultimate, technical distinction being that the soft-focus effect is the result of the lens, not movement of the camera or the subject.) I scan around for a composition that interests me, shapes and colors popping out of the “real subject” that aren’t there when you look with your eyes, only through the tiny unfocused lens.

One thing that I love happens to upset people quite a bit: you can rarely tell what the subjects are. For what it’s worth, they’re almost always clothes that I’m wearing, sometimes my skin, or furniture. But the idea that a photograph should be an easily understandable representation of the subject within is long-past outdated, at least to me. These weren’t photographs of things, they were images, landscapes of colors, textures. Some of them are pretty to look at and don’t mean much of anything. Some of them are, I find, intensely emotional—foreboding, curious, warm.

The camera itself has a huge role in the creation process here, like in the unexpected light leaks of a Lomo. I have only a small control over the focus—I shoot using the Instagram app and have no manual control over the focal length, and who knows what the grain is going to look like. I try to find something in the “viewfinder” that makes me smile or think and then hope I can capture something like it. It never comes out how I meant it because hitting the capture button triggers an autofocus attempt, changing the image drastically, sometimes for the worse (and I reshoot and reshoot, hoping the floundering autofocus will settle somewhere I like it), but usually it’s for the better. A color I didn’t notice pops out. Grain appears in unexpected places. Bokeh materializes magically. Who am I to complain? We can’t control everything.

I feel good about the way these come out.

Addendum

Since I wrote this, I’ve done something crazy. I’ve started using Instagram to take in-focus photographs. I know, blasphemy. Actually, it started out worse than that. I uploaded a scan of an old photograph of my sister and me for “Siblings Day” or something like that. I have since deleted it because, while well-received, the image quality was inexplicably terrible. But the damage was done, and it was intentional.

I decided that I was ready to start giving myself a little more Instagram freedom. I started to take some photographs in focus. I still try to keep them thoughtful, intriguing, or just weird—and I even resort to some of my old tricks, like using the flash in a room with no light, or putting my finger over the flash, or both—but they can be in-focus. Who would’ve thought that would be liberating?

I still second-guess myself and delete photos days later after I’ve decided that they aren’t worthy, and I still feel self-conscious about taking photos that are sharing my life rather than images I’ve made—a distinction between Instagram as social network versus Instagram as art gallery—but I’m also still having fun. And I have a feeling that I’m not quite finished with the out-of-focus photos yet. Below is the last traditional out-of-focus shot, for now.