The rise of the Insta-essay
All about the image? No, Instagram is now all about the captions. Lynn Enright takes a closer look…
on instagram, after you’ve taken the perfect photo, cropped it and fltered it, after you have decided you are completely happy with how it looks – then comes the time for crafting a caption. You might decide that an insouciant emoji will suffice. You might stick to a rudimentary description. You might try and be funny. Or, increasingly, you might write a caption that has actual paragraphs and punctuation and runs to hundreds of words. Celebrities, influencers and normal people alike are realising the power of the Insta-essay.
Captions, once far from the point, have become part and parcel of a successful Instagram post, with supersized ones reading more like blogs. Given that nobody actually blogs any more, these mini-essays are a way for people to share their innermost (well, internet-friendly innermost) thoughts. Frequently, on a platform that’s all about glossy images, a long caption becomes a way of undercutting the idyllic scene in the photo above it. ‘It might look like my life is perfect – but seriously it’s not,’ is often the message being communicated by those The New York Times is now calling the ‘caption-fluencers’.
Six weeks after the TV presenter Laura Jackson had her frst child, for example, she took to Instagram to let her 92,000 followers know how she was adjusting to motherhood. Beneath a beautiful picture of herself and her daughter, she described the sleep-deprived reality, a situation she termed a ‘shitshow’, in a candid 374-word caption.
Similarly, journalist Amy Abrahams often hits the 350-word mark in her Instagram captions. She regularly shares the more gnarly details of her life on the platform: the body-image issues; the loneliness of freelance life; the reality of new parenthood; and, when she suffered a miscarriage in 2018, the heartbreak of baby loss.
When she started using Instagram, she ‘just posted pictures of random things’, but increasingly felt her feed didn’t reflect her reality. ‘I became really sensitive to the fact that what people post online is not the full story of their life and that there can be so much artifce, which makes people fall down the comparison trap, suffer low self-esteem and feel like their life isn’t exciting enough. To try to present a more authentic version of who I am, I started writing longer captions as I felt the image alone didn’t say enough.’
The author Poorna Bell – another devotee of the Insta-essay – says she didn’t consciously set out to write longer captions, but as a writer, ‘it’s never going to be satisfying enough to just post a pretty picture and have people like it’. As she began to write captions on body image, grief, addiction and mental health, she found deeper connections with her 10,800 followers. ‘I realised I was connecting with different communities and that what I was writing was a comfort to other people,’ she says. ‘I also noticed that the posts with the longer and better captions got way more likes – the picture itself was fairly irrelevant – quite reassuring when you consider it’s Instagram and everything is so hyper-focused on looks.’
Both Bell and Abrahams maintain that their long captions don’t take a long time to write – there is a genuineness to them, an urgency, that means they can be fred off in a few minutes. The truth is, if you fnd yourself struggling to write a caption, deliberating over each phrase, you’re probably not going to write something very compelling. Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.