Obama's on Instagram, the Era of Social Political Photojournalism is Here

Instagram, that insanely-popular app that masks your cell phone camera’s poor image quality by reprocessing photos with vintage-style filters, has officially hit the big time. President Obama — or at least his powerful social media team — is now sharing photos along the campaign trail.

It’s a bit jarring at first to see ghostly photos of politicians alongside party pics from faux-hipster girls and millions of Kodachrome sunsets, but in fact Instagram has been on the political beat for a while now, and has gotten even more in-depth for 2012, with a number of forward thinking news outlets like ABC World News, NBC News, and the Washington Post all hosting channels.

It’s an avenue that people likely wouldn’t have expected for Instagram just a few years ago. It now sounds painfully gauche to discuss the power of Twitter in breaking news, especially after a wild 2011 that truly legitimatized social news reporting. And I suppose it’s easy to ascribe Instagram’s foray into the political realm as an offshoot of that, especially when Obama’s team has pushed for user submissions to the page via the #obama2012 hashtag.

But, while breaking a story on Twitter usually involves linking to a more in-depth story (at some point or another), Instagram’s push for social photojournalism on the campaign trail is more one-dimensional — since what you see is all you get, you’d hope that what you do get is high quality. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of talented potential freelancers out there, or that Instagram doesn’t have a bevy of extremely talented users. It’s a strange thought that, in a world where even the cheapest DSLRs offer features that film photogs would have killed for, we’re seeing a shift into getting our campaign photo coverage from whoever’s quickest at snapping-and-uploading from their phone.

Now, I know that professional photojournalists will be going anywhere. The Internet at large is still rabidly hungry for collections of the best photos available, and politics makes for incredibly popular subject material. It is cool to see that Instagram offers a user-generated alternative to that news coverage, especially from the eyes of the well-connected Average Joe who has access to political figures. It’s also more candid, as suggested by the behind-the-scenes style shot above. In that sense, Instagram’s political coverage has potential, although not necessarily in the same way Obama’s social media team would want. It’s a lesson constantly being learned by athletes and actors out on the town acting like buffoons: nowadays, everyone’s got a camera, and with Instagram, there’s always a ready platform and readership for publishing.