Doing it #ForTheGram
Houston is home to unique pop-up Instagram factory that capitalizes on collective cultural moment in which taking photos is experience in itself
Felisha Gray doesn’t always traipse around Montrose with a Mary Poppins bag brimming with wardrobe changes. But her $20 ticket into Houston’s new Instagram factory, the Flower Vault, buys her only an hour of shutterbug time, and she needs to maximize this opportunity. So as she poses in the “Where’s Wallflower” room, where the walls and furniture are upholstered in the same moody, Victorian-inspired fabric, her reinforcements sit in her purse, just outside the frame.
Her friend Richelle Lopez snaps furiously on a small camera. Then a phone.
The two college students are among a dozen people milling through the space at 10:30 a.m. on a Friday. And though the pair is alone in one of five distinct photo sets constructed inside this Montrose “experience,” they are firmly planted in the middle of a broader collective moment. To borrow a hashtag from Instagram, they, along with others, are doing it #ForTheGram.
When Instagram launched at the end of 2010, it counted 25,000 users by the end of its first day. In a year, that grew to 14 million people, posting 400 million photos and earning it the designation of
‘The value in that is perhaps not the photo itself, but the experience.’ Felisha Gray
Apple’s App Store “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011.
Now, those humble beginnings as a photo platform on which your friends shared badly lit and over-filtered shots of last night’s lasagna seem like a million years ago. In 2012, Facebook paid $1 billion for the 13-person startup. Today, the brand has more than 800 million users.
And now, it seems, the app has evolved from an outlet where photographers of all levels can post an image of something that happened to an aspirational space for which people make things happen.
It used to be that a moment necessitated photos. Now photos necessitate creating a moment. Want proof ? Try finding a quiet moment to take a photo at the Sabine Street Bridge or Uptown’s Waterwall on a weekend afternoon. Last year, the influx of people staging elaborate photo shoots in an esplanade set in tony Broadacres evolved into a citywide kerfuffle, when the Broadacres HOA erected signs saying “Welcome to Broadacres: NO photo shoots.” The ban didn’t last long; as it turned out, the HOA didn’t have the jurisdiction to do that.
As demand for the perfect photo backdrop skyrockets, it makes sense that supply would increase, too. Enter Flower Vault.
Owners Robbie and Sarah Forrest launched this pop-up shop in their hometown of San Antonio earlier this year. After posing for a cute family photo just off the side of a busy highway, they had a lightbulb moment that there had to be a better way to facilitate these Gramworthy moments without jeopardizing the lives of parents and their babies.
So they found a spot in their city to open the first incarnation of the Flower Vault, which featured rooms with an oversized seesaw and other cotton-candychromatic backdrops. They knew it would go viral, and it did. So when they ended their limited engagement in San Antonio, they hopped up the highway to Houston for another shortterm lease (they’re here through January) on a small shop. They brought some of the favorite rooms from San Antonio and implemented some new ideas as well.
Within a week, Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles was snapping shots of herself to share with her 3.3 million Instagram followers.
Forrest couldn’t have paid for better publicity. And that is the beauty of a business that relies on Instagram.
(Instagram did not respond to an interview request for this story. It notes on its media page that “due to the high volume of emails, we cannot guarantee we’ll get to every request.”)
It’s about time Houston got a spot like this, Gray says between photos. She knows of a few Instagram experiences that have recently become famous across the nation, incluidng the Museum of Ice Cream, which has locations in several major cities, where guests can revel in a welllit pit of plastic sprinkles.
“But there’s no other place in Houston right now that’s like this,” she says.
That means Gray and Lopez often have to get creative when they’re looking to take fun photos that set them apart on Instagram. A couple of weeks ago, they drove to Baytown with wardrobe changes and baskets full of props (and potato chips) for an all-day affair.
“It was the Lights Festival in Baytown,” Gray explains. “They light up a bunch of lanterns, and they float up into the sky like in the movie ‘Tangled.’ It was pretty cool, and we took some good pictures, too.” That’s why they went. “For sure, we went because we thought it would be a cool place for photos.”
That’s the same reason Gray recently bought tickets to watch “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” at a rooftop movie theater in Houston.
Still, though the Flower Vault appears to be the first of its kind, other businesses certainly have learned to embrace Instagram as part of their marketing strategy.
At the posh new Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston, highend touches worthy of glossy magazine spreads are the name of the game. But even the city’s swankiest digs know the power of social media.
“With social media in mind, we did intentionally design the living flower wall behind Post Oak Motor Cars for an ‘Instagram-worthy’ space,” says Jeff Cantwell, executive vice president of development for Landry’s Inc.
Even so, he says, there are a few other parts of the sprawling campus that have evolved to Instagram hotspots without that intentional planning.
“We see patrons post daily in front of our three-story chandelier in the lobby; the two massive floral arrangements at the front desk; our main restaurant, Bloom & Bee’s, interior space; the pool; and the Rolls-Royce showroom’s two-story staircase,” he says.
It’s eye candy for the folks already staying on the property. But more than that, these eye poppers can get people like Felisha Gray — and her followers — into what can otherwise feel like a stuffy spot.
It’s happened before. This summer, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston transformed part of its space into a wild, winding sea of bamboo bridges in its “Big Bambú” installation. The exhibit consisted of 3,000 bamboo poles lashed together, creating a 30foot-high balcony rising through the museum’s Cullinan Hall.
“These immersive exhibitions bring in new visitors, and they do tend to skew to a younger demographic,” says Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director. He’s careful to note that unlike the flower wall at the Post Oak or the five rooms at the Flower Vault, the MFAH doesn’t design or commission projects with Instagram in mind.
But getting new faces in the door certainly helps marketing. The shots Gray snapped of herself amid the bamboo look like an enviable millennial heaven. Just check the comments: Her followers want to know how they can get a similar photo for their own feeds.
“With our immersive experiences, we find that they’re a helpful introduction to the museum experience because no prior knowledge is required,” Tinterow says. “You just walk into the space, and be.”
And then, he says, hopefully you come back.
Jan Rattia, director of education at the Houston Center for Photography, says Instagram can be a great introduction to the world of art. Even if it means the world of photography feels like it’s buzzing with excess noise these days.
“The thing that will eventually differentiate this is that at the end of the day, you can master a camera and you can make a beautiful photo,” Rattia says. “But that’s still not going to make you a photographer. The point of view, the message, the content of the image. The real reason behind why you’re doing what you’re doing is going to make you one or not.”
In this new chicken-egg world, a new, existential conversation is emerging about what purpose these sort of manufactured photos serve.
“Sometimes the surface, that something pretty, like a flower wall, gives you the introduction into something,” Rattia says. “Hopefully there is more depth to it, and maybe there isn’t.”
But it’s not up to him to assign value to how someone spends his or her time, he says. And whether he deems a photo art isn’t the point.
“The value in that is perhaps not the photo itself, but the experience,” he says. “So perhaps, going through the motions of that experience has an inherent value that’s greater. And at the end of the day, that’s what art is: an experience.”
Gray agrees. As she and Lopez wend their way through the Flower Vault, laughing between takes as they fiddle with framing and toss around inside jokes, they’re less focused on art than a fun morning with a best friend.
They hop into the jumpsuits in the Where’s Wallflower room and suddenly look like two floating heads in a sea of monotonous wallpaper.
“Oh, my God,” Gray says, laughter breaking into her voice as Lopez pulls her long hair out of the jumpsuit. “This is too funny.”