ABSTRACT
This chapter offers strategies for writing about online image repositories like Instagram and focuses specifically on the work of turning the social life of images, their lives and loves, into research questions and methods for developing new conclusions about our visual culture. The Very Black Project is an Instagram account that was created by two artists, Justin Fulton and Andre D. Singleton, who wanted to use social media to promote celebratory messages about black life and art. Visual culture scholars look inside and outside the frame to understand an image’s desires and relationships. The social, political, and cultural complexity of blackness cannot be captured in any one image, even an image from The Very Black Project; instead, blackness is rendered as the unlikely connection between the project’s varied content. The Very Black Project’s very large image collection wants to create a disruptive “black sociality” on Instagram’s platform and, in the process, reveals the analogue qualities of contemporary digital image culture.
