I’ve previously mentioned how I have created, posted to and subsequently deleted multiple blogs and social media accounts. They can be a huge distraction to me personally. I feel like I’ve spent the past decade+ trying to manage social media’s hold on my life and attention. It has often felt like a losing battle. Hence the constant creation and deletion of far too many Facebook and Instagram accounts.
But there is one social account that has survived the axe – it’s called VSCO and it was actually one of the first platforms I joined. I have posted to it sporadically over the years, forgotten among the list of more notable and recognizable mediums. But I have always found myself coming back to it and when I scroll through the photos I’ve posted, I get an overwhelming sense that this is the truest reflection of my life.
VSCO is unpretentious, unstaged, and unhindered by visible likes. There is no notification bell going off to tell me whether the documentation of my life, the photographs I’m so proud of, have been publicly approved by strangers. More than any other platform I’ve used, VSCO feels like a community of creative expression. There is no pressure to “keep up with the Joneses.” The only person I’m compared to is myself.
Why is this important? It’s easy to get stuck in the rut of creating for others. It’s even easier to lose your creative vision amidst the push to give people what they want.
I silenced my own creative voice when I stopped taking the pictures I wanted to take and instead catered to popular trend.
We see those trends being followed by the masses and without a conscious thought, we begin to shift our own aesthetic to align with. it. Guilty as charged… It took such a short time for me to willingly relinquish what made me unique and yet it has taken me the better part of a decade to get it back. To learn to once again see the world through the lens of my own artistry.
I’m thankful that my VSCO page flew under my own radar and survived the vicious culling my other social accounts were subjected to. I’m thankful to have a corner of the web that reflects my heart as a mother and a photographer.
(This sounds like a marketing campaign, but it’s not. I’m not at all affiliated with VSCO. I purchased some editing tools from them early on in my photography career, the very weekend they launched, and jumped on the VSCO app bandwagon almost the moment it was released).
Lea & Lens 