‘Gentrification by Instagram’

We all love an Instagram filter, right?

Posting images of iconic landmarks, filtered to within an inch of their focus and saturated to a watered out, Turner-esque wash of form. We can purge the warts and blemishes, filter out the rough edges and leave only the beauty. We replace the reality with an image with no context, a still-life of no-life.

Just take a look at the Instagram feeds that begin with or have Bristol in their name: Bristol Doors, Bristol Lens, Igers Bristol, Live Bristol, Bristol Bloggers, Bristol Pictures; all promoting themselves as posters of beautiful images of our wonderful city.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BhM5i2rhCt4

https://www.instagram.com/p/BgvfRvjFgeR

What is the unexpected outcome of all these Instagram accounts? I think it’s gentrification by Instagram.

Here is my problem: I don’t live in their Bristol. I don’t walk on their wisteria-canopied pathways, or sip their soya lattes in their Georgian squares. They are gentrifying our city and they don’t even know it.

They promote the city as a whole, using #Bristol as their hook but only focusing on the affluent, white, middle-class areas.

The parts from the square mile from the Suspension Bridge to the Arnolfini and from the Create Centre to the top of Park Street. I mean, why bother with the rest of Bristol when you can mine such a rich seam of Instagrammable locations?

Promoting their images in the name of Bristol, they filter and cleanse until the image on their laptops matches the saccharine idyll in their lifestyle magazines. Then they post with comments like “Bristol at sunset” or “Coloured houses make everything more cheerful”. As long as they are in Clifton.

There are no pictures of Hengrove or Lockleaze, no images of Knowle or Withywood. There is no promotion of the cafes of Warmley or the bakeries of Brislington. Where are the images of the real Bristol? Where is the Victorian grandeur of Staple Hill? Or the greenery of Fishponds?

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfu1FNJFEtd

And why do these accounts sanitise the image of Bristol? Some are promoting their own amateur pictures, some are promoting their businesses, and some are promoting themselves. What commercial tie-ins are being won for filtration of our city? What free lunches are being eaten in exchange for tagging a clean and washed-out image of Park Street?

Instagram ‘influencers’ who line their pockets by pretending they represent an image of a city that they have created, and endlessly promote themselves as representatives of it, are profiting from a falsehood.

There is neither integrity nor truth in their feeds. They mask the complexity of our city by focussing on the bland, removing the ugly and sanitising the dirty. All of these make up the fabric of our city. All of these things are Bristol.

Maybe it’s for financial gain, maybe it’s for personal vindication or maybe to create a sense of place, somewhere to claim as their own. Whatever their motivation is to filter the world, it leaves Bristol as a blander, repetitive, sanitised version of itself.

Thomas Oxley was recently blocked from a popular Bristol Instagram account for what he claims was suggesting their Clifton focus was not the best reflection of Bristol, and for what they claim was trolling.