Yes, Instagram is a bowl full of barbed wire and turned milk for breakfast. I can’t believe the utter crap in my feed. On the other hand, living in Portland, Oregon, where the last real photography gallery closed several years ago, and the only thing left is a non-profit which chooses its exhibitions by committee—hence, of course, any vision is impossible—I am dependent on IG to find new photographers to watch.
And you know what? Wading through the fecal water of the algorithmic flood does turn up some really marvelous photographers. Here are a few I’m watching, in no particular order.
Máté Bartha. Spread from Anima Mundi.
1 Máté Bartha. @mate.bartha. OK, I did find Máté through an article in the wonderful online photo mag, C4, but I connected with him via IG. He lives and works in Budapest. When I received his book, Anima Mundi, I kept saying aloud to myself, as I paged through it, “This is the most fucked-up photobook I own!” That, by the way, is perhaps my highest praise. Máté is swimming in the ocean of his own world, his own way of seeing the world, and that ocean is bobbing with references like Giordano Bruno, Mallarmé, William Blake. Plato, Mondrian…the list of kindred spirits continues. He is working with imposed grids over city scapes and the semiotics of images and his human encounters in the city. It’s about the city, it’s about the spirit. It’s going to take me some time to really digest it. And that is such a worthwhile endeavor. Máté is starting to attract much-deserved attention and recognition out there.
Uta Genilke. Spread from Sacre.
2. Uta Genilke. @pik.dam. Now Uta is someone I did discover on Instagram, and I’ve since acquired one of her several slim books. Uta has fearlessly followed her inclinations in composing—as a poet would compose—these books, and is not afraid of puzzling mixes of images or to sometimes paint over or collage her photographs. Like Máté, it’s her mind at work in the making and choosing and sequencing of her images that enlivens photography with something new. Uta lives in Hamberg, and is known to frequent Berlin. Her books are starting to win more awards and get into exhibitions, but I know I would never have found her work if it wasn’t for Instagram. What a sadness if I hadn’t.
Pavel Mikailovskii. Image from White Like Heaven series.
3. Pavel Mikhailovskii. @pavel.mikhailovskii. When I find myself stopping my scrolling, over and over again, at the images from the same photographer, I know something’s up. And Pavel’s photographs always stop me. He’s working very much in a similar way to how I’ve found myself working lately, making decontextualized tight shots that are confusing and mysterious. Of course, different things in the world are catching Pavel’s eye, and I find what he’s posting always worth looking at closely. These are discoveries in the corners and above eye-view, in places where people either don’t look or don’t see if they do look. Pavel sees. He lives in Amsterdam. I’m so interested to watch where the work goes, and to receive news of Pavel’s first book.
Marco Messa. A pair of photographs from his web site.
4. Marco Messa. @nn_ho_un_nick_name. Color. Color! Marco is clearly in love with color. Not so much color photography—which is indeed what he shoots—but with color itself as principal content. His are tight shots with unworldly color, exaggerated but taken from the real world. He favors a very narrow, tall aspect ratio, which gives his images the slight element of a scroll painting, but not really. And again, my personal tastes are showing, in that he tends to extract (not abstract) things from that real world. I always know its a Marco photo as soon as I see it, although he rarely shoots similar subject matter. I just find his images a source of constant delight.
Gui Marcondes. A spread from I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me.
5. Gui Marcondes. @gui.m.photo. Gui is a Brazilian who divides his time between New York and São Paulo. Gui has published books and jurored shows and has been interviewed on Nearest Truth and Nowhere Diary. So it’s not like Gui isn’t getting attention. I find his work always surprising and provocative. He’s also comfortable painting over images, creating abrupt juxtapositions, abstracting patterns from images and other processes I don’t fully understand. He published a book in 2023, I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me, with Nearest Truth Editions. Rich, challenging work.
Anastasia Davis. Spread from Self-Portrait By The House Wall.
6. Anastatia Davis. @anastatiadavis_. In keeping with the general direction of the other photographers I’m watching, Anasttatia is pulling images out of the world, both black and white and color, and creating non-narrative sequences of images for books and zines. Her images are often tight extractions from reality which become her own mysterious vocabulary for making meaning. She graduated from the Hartford MFA in 2024 and has definitely attracted my continued attention.
So that’s six of the photographers I’m following right now on Instagram. Photographers whose work is expanding my sense of what photography and the photobook can be. If I’ve introduced a new photographer for you to follow then I’ve done what I hoped to do.