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The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.
Hey friends, so before we get started I wanted to give some updates on the book. On life. On the podcast.
First, I’ve had some friends and listeners from the UK and Australia, graciously check in and see how I’m doing with everything that is going on over here. You know with what I’m calling the rise of dumb facism over here. I just want to say, yeah it’s pretty bad. It could be worse, and things for me are okay. I’m in Southern California, which is a big bubble, thankfully. But there are people around the country, especially right now in Minnesota (even in my community here in San Diego) that are scared.
I am still hopeful though, I think we have to be. I think, everyone that I know anyway, are cautious in our optimism.
It’s always weird to write the podcast, then record the podcast because it feels like, on some level that I’m ignoring what is going on. That I spend 45 minutes going on and on about televangelist camera influencers. It feels like privilege, it kind is I reckon.
But on some level, I welcome the distraction. Work, at least for me anyway, keeps me grounded and focused on something other than what is going on.
Anyway, I wanted to say thank you for all of you who drop me notes through out the week, I really appreciate it.
Just a quick update on the book, thank you to all of you who have placed preorders, right now the book is at press and I will be sending you an email shortly with an expected ship date. So stay tuned for that. It’s not too late to get your pre-order in, just head over to TerriblePhotographer.com and when you order, I will get your book out as soon as this latest run comes in. Hopefully within 24-hours of them coming in. I’m really anxious to get them into your hands.
Lastly, and this is the final thing, right now, I wanted to ask something of you. If you like the show, if you think it has been available to you, could you do me a HUGE favor, and share it with a friend? Post it on Instagram or Threads or LinkedIn. That is such a big deal. I’m working on some easy ways to do this, stay tuned for that. But until then, I would really really it.
Okay, let’s get on with it shall we. I have to warn you, I’m a bit under the weather, so if my voice sounds rough, thats why. I’m done with rambling I swear.
—------------------------
So I posted a question on Threads a few nights ago.
Simple question: "Where are you posting your images these days?"
I was curious. Because I know Instagram isn't working for still photographers anymore. And I wanted to know where people went.
The answers came in. Dozens of them.
Threads. Substack. Glass. Grainery. Facebook. Some other apps I'd never heard of.
One person said Flickr.
Like they'd been frozen in 2008 and just thawed out.
Very few people said Instagram.
There is no home anymore.
Instagram used to be THE place for photographers. Not just A place. THE place.
The portfolio platform. The discovery engine. The industry standard.
When people asked "Where can I see your work?" the answer was: "Instagram."
Now? We're scattered.
Refugees trying platform after platform, hoping one of them becomes what Instagram used to be.
But none of them will.
Because Instagram didn't just change.
It destroyed the thing it created.
And left us with nowhere to go.
THE HANDSHAKE
My name is Patrick Fore, and this is The Terrible Photographer where we have honest conversations about creativity, identity and finding your voice.
This is part 3 of a series of episodes I'm calling, Heresies, where we say the things the photography industry would prefer you not think too hard about and the series that might get me into some trouble..
Just to give you a bit of a recap:
Episode 47 we eased into the series with The Proxy - we talked about how we off load creative decision making to our clients.
Episode 49 - The Cult Member was all about gear, and how camera companies manufacturing inadequacy.
Episode 50 - last week - The Oracle - was about gear influencers monetizing that inadequacy.
This week though, we’re at episode 51, we made it to 51 friends.
I’m calling this episode, The Corpse. (Do you see a theme happening here?)
Today we’re talking about how Instagram was built by photographers, for photographers—and then systematically killed the still image in favor of video. How we spent a decade optimizing for an algorithm that just told us everything we learned was wrong. And why maybe we should thank Instagram for dying.
Because what it gave us was killing us the whole time.
If this is your first episode, welcome. Feel free to jump around—they're in no particular order. And as always, you can email me anytime. My email's in the show notes. I read everything.
So, with all that said, let’s get into it.
ACT 1: THE ORIGIN STORY
Instagram launched in 2010. October 6th.
It was literally built for photographers.
Square format—mimicking Polaroids and medium format cameras like the Hasselblad.
Filters—mimicking darkroom techniques. Black and white conversions. Cross-processing. Vintage color shifts.
Grid layout—a digital portfolio. Your feed was your body of work.
Community of image-makers—photographers finding photographers. Hashtags as discovery. Following based on visual style, not celebrity.
It was supposed to be our platform.
And for a while, it was.
I remember 2012, 2013. Instagram was magic.
You'd post an image and people who actually cared about photography would see it. Comment on it. Not "🔥🔥🔥" but actual thoughts about the light, the composition, what the image was trying to say.
You could build a following based purely on the quality of your work. No dancing. No trending audio. No need to be a personality.
Just make good images. Post consistently. Engage with the community.
It worked.
Photographers got discovered. Got hired. Built careers.
Instagram was doing what it promised: connecting image-makers with audiences.
Then it changed.
2016: Instagram replaces chronological feed with algorithmic feed. You no longer see posts in the order they were posted. You see what the algorithm thinks you want to see.
2018: IGTV launches. Instagram's attempt to compete with YouTube. Nobody used it. It failed.
2020: Reels launches. Instagram's attempt to compete with TikTok. This one worked. Too well.
2021: Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, says it out loud: "We are no longer a photo-sharing app."
2022-2024: The algorithm increasingly favors Reels. Photographers report reach dropping 70%, 80%, 90% for still images.
The same quality work that got 10,000 likes in 2019 gets 500 in 2024.
Not because the work got worse. Because the algorithm changed.
2025-2026: Still images functionally dead on Instagram. If you're not making Reels, you're invisible.
This wasn't evolution. This was a hostile takeover.
Instagram didn't slowly expand to include video. It systematically killed the still image to compete with TikTok.
And photographers—who built Instagram, who made it the cultural force it became—were told: Adapt or die.
Learn video. Buy a gimbal. Get a lapel mic. Become a cinematographer.
Or become irrelevant.
ACT 2: THE TURN
Everyone expects me to say: "Instagram betrayed us. We lost our platform. This is a tragedy."
But I need to ask something.
Was Instagram ever actually good for photography?
You weren't shooting for your portfolio. You were shooting to pay rent to the platform.
If you stopped posting for two weeks, your reach died. Your engagement dropped. The algorithm decided you weren't "active" anymore and stopped showing your work.
Your "business" disappeared.
That's not a portfolio. That's a content treadmill. That's sharecropping.
You're working someone else's land. And if you stop working, they take it away.
Instagram turned photography into a commodity of 1.2 seconds.
That's how long an image has to grab attention in the feed.
If it doesn't shout immediately—high contrast, bright colors, shocking subject—it's scrolled past. Algorithmically deprioritized.
So we optimized for shout.
We stopped making images that reward patience. That reveal themselves slowly. That require you to look.
We made images for the scroll.
Think about the last 50 images you posted.
How many were quiet? Subtle? Images that needed more than 1.2 seconds to understand?
How many would work printed at 30×40 inches, where someone could stand in front of them for five minutes?
Or were they all designed to stop thumbs?
Did Instagram help you find your voice? Or did it teach you to mimic what performs?
How many times did you shoot something because YOU wanted to make it versus because you knew it would perform?
How many times did you look at your engagement metrics and think: "I guess people don't want to see this kind of work."
How many times did you edit an image not to match your vision but to match what you thought the algorithm wanted?
I did this constantly.
I'd shoot something I loved. Post it. It would get half the engagement of my usual posts.
And I'd think: "I guess that wasn't good."
Not: "The algorithm didn't favor it."
But: "It wasn't good."
I let a machine tell me what was good.
I outsourced my artistic intuition to an algorithm I didn't understand, designed by people who don't care about photography, optimized for engagement metrics that have nothing to do with craft.
We edited our souls in real-time to match the preferences of a faceless audience we couldn't see and didn't know.
END SEGMENT 1
ACT 3: THE MOSSERI REVELATION
So on December 31st, 2025. Adam Mosseri, Instagram's head, posts on Threads.
An essay titled "Authenticity after abundance."
He writes: "Just as AI makes polish cheap, phone cameras have made professional-looking imagery ubiquitous—both trends cheapen the aesthetic."
"The camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic. They're competing to make everyone look like a professional photographer from the past."
"But flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume."
Let me read that again.
"Flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume."
The platform that spent a decade training photographers to make flattering images—sharp, well-lit, technically perfect—just published a post saying that aesthetic is cheap and boring.
He continues: "Savvy creators are going to lean into explicitly unproduced and unflattering images of themselves. In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn't just aesthetic preference anymore—it's proof. It's defensive."
Think about that for a second.
Mosseri isn’t just asking for 'imperfection'; he’s asking for performative incompetence. It’s the heresy of the 'Ugly Aesthetic.' We are being told to vandalize our own technical mastery just to 'prove' we aren’t bots. It’s a protection racket: 'Nice craft you have there... shame if the algorithm thought it was AI and buried it.'
We spent decades mastering lighting. Learning composition. Studying color theory. Perfecting our craft.
And now the head of Instagram is saying: That's the wrong direction.
Camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic.
Flattering imagery is boring.
You need to make "explicitly unproduced and unflattering" images to succeed.
Explicitly unproduced.
Meaning: make sure people can tell it's unproduced. Perform the amateurism. Signal the rawness.
Now, Mosseri's not wrong about the mechanism.
He's observing something real. AI panic. Deepfakes getting better. People becoming suspicious of polish.
He writes: "authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible." Meaning: AI can fake anything now. So imperfection becomes the only way to prove you're human.
He's describing a real phenomenon.
But here's the problem: Instagram created that phenomenon.
They chose to flood the platform with AI. They chose to make professional photography invisible. They chose to prioritize Reels over stills.
They chose to tell creators: adapt or die.
And now Mosseri is standing in the wreckage saying "Savvy creators will adapt."
It's like burning down a house and then writing an essay about how people should learn to live in tents.
And this is not authenticity.
His own words give it away: "Rawness isn't just aesthetic preference anymore—it's proof. It's defensive."
Defensive.
We're not making raw images because we want to. We're making them because we have to prove we're not AI.
We're sabotaging our craft as a defensive measure against a problem Instagram helped create.
And earlier in the post, he says this about Instagram's square photo feed—the thing the platform was built for:
"That feed is dead."
Not "declining." Not "evolving."
Dead.
He writes: "People largely stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago."
And he's fine with it. Because they moved to Stories. To DMs. To Reels.
The still image—the thing Instagram was built for—is dead. And Instagram killed it.
And now they're telling photographers: If you want to survive, make your work look worse.
And the comments on his post? Brutal.
One creator writes: "I just miss when static posts were the thing. not having to make reels, rage bait, or carousels just to be seen. it's also disappointing that Meta is making AI so accessible on Instagram. You wanna say REAL creators/creations matter more, stop making AI photographs/reels so easy to create."
Another: "When Instagram refuses to remove deepfakes because they profit from them, that's not betting on authenticity. That's choosing profits over people."
Another: "By definition, authenticity means real, not imitation. So I don't see how the abundance of AI tools and content could allow for authenticity to be infinitely reproducible. However, I agree that a raw aesthetic is becoming more prevalent. We're basically choosing raw, unpolished, sometimes lower-quality content as a proxy for real. It's a sad state of humanity."
Instagram could have said: "We value craft. We'll find ways to verify human-made work without requiring photographers to sabotage their images."
They could have built authentication tools. Fingerprinting for real media. Better AI labeling.
And Mosseri mentions some of this in his post. He talks about camera manufacturers cryptographically signing images. About surfacing credibility signals. About labeling AI content.
But they're building those tools while simultaneously telling creators: Make your work look amateur or you won't be seen.
So which is it? Do you value craft or not?
Because you can't say "authenticity matters" while calling professional photography "boring."
You can't say "creators matter" while forcing them to become videographers.
You can't say "we're betting on real" while flooding the feed with AI-generated content.
You can't say "flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume" after spending a decade training photographers to produce flattering imagery.
Instagram isn't protecting authenticity. Instagram is monetizing the anxiety that their own choices created.
They made the problem. Now they're selling the solution.
And the solution is: make yourself look worse.
Instagram lit the god damned fire. Now they're selling you the fire extinguisher.
And I'm tired.
Not angry anymore. Just tired.
Tired of the rules changing. Tired of being told the craft I spent years mastering is "the wrong aesthetic."
Tired of Instagram standing in the ruins of what they built and telling us it's our fault for not adapting fast enough.
ACT 4: THE SCATTERING
So if Instagram isn't for photographers anymore, where did the photographers go?
That's the wrong question.
The right question is: Why couldn't they go anywhere?
Because there's no "anywhere" to go. No alternative that has what Instagram had.
Not the reach. Not the discovery. Not the cultural weight.
Photographers are scattered across a dozen platforms, each with a fraction of the audience. Each requiring you to start over. Each hoping to become the next Instagram.
None of them will.
Photography communities only work at scale.
A portfolio platform with 50,000 photographers is a graveyard. Nobody's there. Nobody's looking.
A portfolio platform with 50 million photographers? That's a community. That's discovery. That's where clients look. That's where careers get built.
Instagram had that. For a while.
Then it decided it didn't want to be that anymore.
Photographers are now scattered refugees, trying platform after platform, hoping one becomes the new center of gravity.
But none of them will.
Because network effects are nearly impossible to recreate.
The only platform that could replace Instagram was Instagram. And they chose not to be that anymore.
If Instagram is your client pipeline, you don't have options. You have a dilemma.
You can stay on Instagram and adapt. Learn Reels. Make videos. Accept 10% of your previous reach and hope it's enough to keep clients finding you.
Spend 10 hours a week on content creation that used to take 30 minutes. Hope the algorithm doesn't change again. Hope your competitors don't adapt faster.
Or you can try to replace Instagram with something else.
Build a website. Run Google ads. Network locally. Partner with venues and planners. Go back to the pre-Instagram playbook.
All of which costs time and money. All of which requires skills you might not have. All of which means starting from zero while your Instagram reach continues to die.
Or you can do both. Stay on Instagram while building other channels. Which means working twice as hard for the same result.
None of these are good options.
They're just different kinds of scrambling.
And the photographers who built their businesses on Instagram—the wedding shooters, the family photographers, the local portrait specialists—they didn't do anything wrong.
They weren't naive. They weren't reckless.
They built their businesses on the best available platform at the time.
They just built on rented land. And the landlord changed the terms.
But here’s the heresy: we aren't even the tenants on this land. We don’t live there. Our home was always an illusion. The whole time, we’ve been the product. When a photographer 'boosts' a post because their organic reach is dead, they are paying the landlord to let them show their own work to the people who already followed them. It’s a double-tax on the creator. You pay with your data and your time to build the audience, and then you pay with your cash to actually speak to them.
Tomorrow was never promised.
But when tomorrow was working, it was easy to forget that.
End Segment 2
ACT 5: WHAT WE LOST (AND WHAT WE SHOULD BE GLAD TO LOSE)
What we lost:
Reach. You could build an audience of 100K+ for free. That was real. That mattered. Some of those people became clients. Some became friends. Some just appreciated your work.
Discoverability. Clients could find you. You could find community. Hashtags worked. The Explore page worked.
A center of gravity. Everyone was there. So everyone could be found.
And I need to be honest about something else.
Instagram's competitive energy pushed me to shoot more.
I lived in Bellingham. Had a few people on my team who were also photographers. Really good ones.
And we'd all post.
It became a game. Almost a friendly competition.
Someone would post something great on Saturday. You'd see it. And you'd think: "Alright, I need to get out there."
So you'd grab your camera. Go shoot. Come back. Edit. Post.
And the cycle would continue. Week after week. Push each other. Make each other better.
Instagram didn't just give us reach. It gave us a reason to create.
Not the best reason. Not a pure reason. But a reason.
And when that disappeared—when the algorithm stopped showing your work to the people who actually cared—the fuel disappeared too.
It wasn't just that reach died. It was that the motivation died.
Because you weren't shooting for yourself. You were shooting for the game.
And when the game ended, a lot of cameras stayed in their bags.
Mine included. For a while.
I think about the Bellingham crew sometimes.
We don't shoot together anymore. We're scattered. Different cities. Different lives.
But I wonder: Are they still shooting?
Or did their cameras go quiet too when Instagram stopped rewarding it?
I could reach out and ask. But part of me doesn't want to know.
Because if they stopped, it confirms what I'm afraid of:
That we weren't photographers who used Instagram.
We were content creators who happened to own cameras.
And when the platform died, so did we.
I don't know how to feel about that.
On one hand: If you only shoot because Instagram rewards it, were you ever really a photographer?
On the other hand: Does it matter? If the system pushed you to create, and you created good work, does the motivation matter?
I don't have a clean answer.
But I do know this: If your only reason to shoot was Instagram, you were building on quicksand.
And for a lot of photographers, the loss is more immediate than motivation or community.
It's their livelihood.
I talk to photographers all the time. Wedding shooters. Family photographers. Local portrait photographers.
And I always ask: "Where do you find clients?"
The answer, for years, has been: "Instagram."
Not "one of my channels." Not "it helps."
Instagram.
That's where brides find them. Where families find them. Where local clients discover them and book them.
Some commercial photographers too. Product shooters. Branding photographers. Food photographers.
Instagram was their storefront. Their portfolio. Their discovery engine.
They built their entire client acquisition pipeline on a platform they didn't own.
And here's the thing: It worked.
For a long time, it worked really well.
You'd post consistently. Build a local following. Tag your location. Use hashtags. Engage with your community.
And clients would find you. Book you. Refer you.
You could build a six-figure business purely on Instagram referrals.
But tomorrow was never promised.
Instagram never guaranteed that reach would continue. Never promised the algorithm wouldn't change. Never signed a contract saying "we'll always show your work to your local audience."
But photographers built their businesses on it anyway.
Because it worked. And because there wasn't a better option.
And now that reach is dying. The algorithm changed. Still images are invisible. Reels are prioritized.
And those photographers—the ones whose businesses run on Instagram discovery—are trapped.
They can't leave. Because leaving means clients stop finding them. And clients stopping means no work.
But they can't stay on the old terms either. Because the old terms don't work anymore.
So they're stuck. Making Reels they don't want to make. Posting 10 times more content for 10% of the reach. Watching their business slowly die while Instagram tells them to adapt faster.
This isn't just about losing creative motivation.
For a lot of photographers, this is about losing their income.
And Instagram never cared. Because Instagram never promised anything in the first place.
What we should be glad to lose:
The content treadmill. Post daily or disappear. Keep feeding the machine. Never stop.
Algorithmic optimization. Shooting for performance, not vision.
The 1.2-second attention economy. Images as dopamine hits. Craft reduced to "does this grab attention immediately?"
Outsourced judgment. Letting metrics determine quality. Letting an algorithm tell you what's good.
Rented land. Building your career on a platform you don't own. Where the rules can change overnight.
Instagram didn't just change the algorithm.
It changed us.
It trained us to value reach over craft. Optimize for engagement over expression. Shoot for the audience over ourselves. Measure success in metrics over meaning.
THE AUTOPSY
So maybe this isn't an obituary. Maybe it's an autopsy.
The patient was already sick.
Instagram didn't kill photography by pivoting to video.
Instagram was killing photography the whole time.
We just didn't notice because we were too busy getting likes.
What Instagram did:
Turned craft into content. You weren't making images. You were feeding the algorithm.
Replaced judgment with metrics. "Good" meant "performed well." Not "made me feel something."
Created artificial urgency. Post daily or die. Art requires space. Instagram required constant production.
Commodified images. 1.2 seconds. If it didn't shout, it was worthless.
Made reach the primary goal. More followers = success. Even if those followers never bought a print. Never hired you. Never actually cared.
THE MIRROR
I'm complicit in all of this.
I built my following on Instagram. Used it to get clients. It worked, for a while.
I posted consistently. Studied what performed. Optimized.
And it paid off. Got work. Got reach. Felt like I was building something.
But I also shot things I didn't care about because I knew they'd perform.
Stopped shooting things I loved because they didn't perform.
Checked engagement metrics more than I looked at my actual work.
Felt more anxiety about posting than excitement about making.
Instagram gave me reach.
But what did it cost?
I can't separate the benefits from the damage.
The clients I got from Instagram are real. The work I made for them is work I'm proud of.
But the images I made FOR Instagram? Most of them are forgettable. Designed to perform. Optimized for engagement.
Not bad. Just... empty.
I knew I was doing it. I wasn't naive. I understood the game.
But I played it anyway. Because the alternative was invisibility.
And invisibility felt like death.
So I can't stand here and say "Instagram corrupted photography" without acknowledging: I participated.
I fed the machine. I optimized for the algorithm. I outsourced my judgment.
Not because I was tricked. Because I wanted the reach.
And now that the reach is gone, I have to ask: What was I actually building?
THE PIVOT
Instagram dying—or at least, dying for still photographers—might be the best thing that could happen to photography.
Not because there's a better platform waiting.
There isn't.
But because the absence of a platform forces a question we've been avoiding:
Why are you making images?
If it's not for likes, what is it for?
If it's not for reach, what's the point?
If it's not for the algorithm, who are you making it for?
Maybe the answer is:
For yourself. For the 10 people who actually care about your work. For clients who will pay you. For prints on walls. For the slow accumulation of a body of work that means something. For the craft itself.
Instagram trained us to believe that if nobody saw it, it didn't matter.
But photographers made meaningful work for 150 years before Instagram.
And they'll make meaningful work after Instagram is gone.
If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, would you still be a photographer?
Not "would you have a way to show your work" but "would you still MAKE work?"
If the answer is no—if your motivation to shoot was tied to posting, to engagement, to reach—then Instagram didn't make you a photographer.
It made you a content creator who happened to use a camera.
And there's nothing wrong with being a content creator. It's a legitimate job. It pays bills.
But it's not photography.
Photography is about making images that matter. Images that last. Images that say something.
Content creation is about feeding algorithms. Keeping people scrolling. Optimizing for engagement.
They're different jobs.
We've spent 15 years pretending they're the same.
End Segment 3
THE ENDING
I haven't posted on Instagram in three weeks.
Not as a boycott. Not as a statement.
I just stopped.
My business didn't collapse. Clients didn't forget about me. The world didn't end.
I shot more last month than I have in a year.
Not for Instagram. Just for me.
Images that don't shout. Images that would have performed terribly. Images that require you to look for more than 1.2 seconds to understand.
And I like them more than anything I've posted in the last two years.
There's a hard drive on my desk. Full of work from the last month.
Nobody's seen it. Nobody will see most of it.
Some of it will become client work eventually. Some will sit there forever.
But it exists. And I made it. And that's enough.
Ending Music Start
I don't know if I'll go back to Instagram. Maybe I will. Maybe the algorithm will change again.
But I doubt it.
Because Instagram has shown us what it values. And it's not photography.
So I'm doing what I should have done years ago:
Building on land I own.
Website. Email list. Physical prints. Client relationships.
It's slower. It's harder. It's less sexy than viral posts and follower counts.
But it's mine. And no algorithm can take it away.
I'm not making images for the scroll anymore.
I'm not measuring my work by how many people double-tapped it.
I'm not adding fake grain to prove I'm human.
I'm not vandalizing my craft to satisfy an algorithm that will change again in six months.
The platform is dying.
Maybe that means photography can live again.
I’ll leave you with this question, If your work is 'boring' to an algorithm, does that finally mean it’s interesting to a human?
Stay curious. Stay courageous. Stay terrible.