A photodump is when you upload a whole bunch of photos onto your Instagram feed all at once.
To qualify as a photodump, the photos must appear as artless as possible – as if you just selected them at random in five seconds while sitting on the loo.
Still, there are unwritten rules. You must open with a picture of yourself looking incredibly hot but in an insouciant sort of way. Your ‘carousel’ (that’s the technical term) may also include: salad; a couple of your friends laughing hysterically; and maybe two or three more selfies in which you again look smoking hot.
The photodump is, in some ways, the antithesis of how social media used to work. Instagram launched in 2010, the same year the iPhone began to feature front-facing selfie cameras; the same year
that the mental health of female teenagers began its alarming decline.
Back then, the thing was to post just the one perfect, artful photo per day. As social media have evolved towards more impermanent, throwaway content, however, to post an image onto your Instagram wall – potentially for ever! – seems rather fraught with significance.
The beauty of the photodump is that it allows one to present a more multifaceted, less overdetermined version of one’s life. In musical terms, it’s an album as opposed to a single. It says, ‘I’m cool and fun but I’m also a great friend and parent and I don’t take myself too seriously!’ Instagram recently upped the maximum photos from 10 to 20 in response to the trend.
For celebrity-watchers, the ‘seasonal photodump’ is increasingly a newsworthy event, rather as LPs used to be. The model Gigi Hadid used her August photodump to treat her 77.5 million followers to images of streams, weddings, her own reflection, garden-hose frolics,
children’s colouring books and a yellow Miu Miu handbag which promptly sold out. Jennifer Lopez’s 251 million followers, meanwhile, glimpsed a summer of ice cream and Super Mario backpacks, as well as J Lo’s cleavage, bottom, and Insta wisdom: ‘Everything is unfolding in divine order.’
Lopez and her husband Ben Affleck recently filed for divorce. The photodump said: life goes on.
So that’s celebs. But are not all Instagram-users celebrities to some extent? You might consider grouping your recent photos under the term #bratsummer or #demureautumn or #octoberdump. Remember, it should look very much as if you uploaded it with scarcely a second thought – oh, but
lots of thought went into it. Absolutely aeons of thought.
The librarians of the great Mouseion of Alexandria catalogued their shelves with scarcely less discernment.
Richard Godwin
