Within the last couple years, social media has lost its purpose in becoming a place to share moments in life and connect with friends. Social media is now a business to everyone in it, and there must always be some profit. 

Spring/Summer 2017 is when I started modeling for portrait photographers around Minneapolis from Instagram. Now I don’t model for anyone.

What changed?

I truly believe that social media started out with good intentions. A place to keep up with your friends and people you admired and then it became a business, not just for brands but for everyone in it. Brands are exploiting the power that social media has and now brands don’t include just companies that make products. Now everyone is a brand and there must always be some benefit for them.

Once I started modeling, it became kind of like a drug and I couldn’t stop because now I wanted more pretty pictures of myself once I had posted all the photos from that one shoot. I distracted myself from my top priorities for photoshoots and posting times because of this,  instead of keeping my focus on my college education. I also started to feel validated from friends, significant others, and even complete strangers because they liked how I looked in a portrait photo I posted. I would actually get anxiety if I thought a picture wasn’t performing well, which was basically anything that didn’t reach 100 likes and then that became 150 likes and so on. I bought into the numbers of the social media game and thought that it would make me feel valued.

Some photographers will not shoot with me at all because they don’t like how I look, because I am not a signed model or have a large following, or because I can’t pay their rates. As for not liking how I look, I guess that makes sense because we all have different ideas of what we like physically. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. I still didn’t feel pretty enough and it transitioned into my life that wasn’t even online. I started to look at myself and think that I needed to change this about myself in order to be more appealing for shoots. There are so many pictures I never posted because I didn’t like how I looked in them. That will always still be a thing, but it was especially exacerbated in portraits. If I looked fat or had a pimple that wasn’t retouched, I didn’t post it. I was so self-conscious of my looks and my body that I wouldn’t leave my apartment without at least some makeup on and I would keep thinking I needed to lose just 5-10 pounds when I was already a size 2.

I doubt I will ever sign to a modeling agency. I can’t afford it with a part-time job and a full-time college education. I’m also only 5’4” and I’m not skinny enough and I don’t have a very defined face. I don’t scream model material. I won’t try getting signed because it would be for the wrong reasons, it would basically be just for the label of getting signed so I could be taken seriously as a model. 

As for paying rates, I have never paid for a photoshoot with a photographer since my senior pictures from high school. Every shoot I have done has been a collaboration and right now those are hard to come by. Photographers want to get paid for their hard work which is understandable but I can’t afford to pay $150 per hour for pretty pictures not with student loans, rent and my electric bill piling up. 

There is also a lot of competition now amongst others in the Instagram model and photography community. The Instagram community is so saturated with models and photographers now that it's hard to set yourself apart from others. We constantly critique and judge the work of others. We are nice to each other in person and trash talk behind each other’s backs. I started to realize that I never quite knew who my real friends were in this whole instagram modeling thing. Some people I once saw as good friends when we were introduced to each other through portrait photography, I don’t even talk to anymore. They’ve either moved onto other things or I thought they were a friend when in reality they weren’t. 

In retrospect it’s sad that I would spend hours of my time, trying to look good for Instagram and take good Instagram photos. 

In the end, being a model isn’t what I want for my future. It’s not my career goal and it’s not the focus in my life. 

Being an “instagram model” was great at times because I did meet some awesome friends but the cons outweighed the pros and for the state of my mental health, I knew I needed to stop. 

It’s sad that this is the society that we have come to be, where likes, followers, and validation of some pretty pictures is what makes you happy. That happiness is only temporary and then you are left chasing a permanent state of that happiness. It’s temporary and there’s so much more to live for than the perfect Instagram photo.