Make a picture, add an effect, load it up, be individual. That’s the untold promise of social platforms like instagram. Since it is very easy to produce fairly good pictures with some artistic touch, the amount of artistic photographers is rising rapidly. And with it, the frequency of lunch pictures and cat art. Mercedes Benz now heads off to change that and searches for the natural enemy of average: the untamed. In a worldwide digital photo exhibition, instagram users are called to send in their creative and most outstanding pictures. It is all about being different, being wild, being untamed. But who defines that? Well, this is pretty nerdy: they programmed a system to analyze the pictures. The so-called “untamed score” defines, how much the pictures differ from the others. So better be extreme here.
That also could mean to break the conventional borders of social media, which teach us to be liked and to be somehow aligned to the rules of the community. This campaign could be read as a challenge to break those rules. Art is always about breaking rules, nothing one would connect to the average Mercedes Benz customer. The brand was for people searching for lasting products, for security and maybe for social status – within the rules of community. With this new campaign, the company reaches out for new people, for the young and untamed. Although this might be quite a gap to jump over, the digital exhibition could be a good opportunity to present new ideas in photography and how to position art in the digital world.
Connecting digital and real world is more and more natural. On top of the instagram campaign, the exhibition will be produced live in April in Paris. Already now, you can upload pictures to untamed-installation and connect to #untamed.
Article sponsored by Mercedes-Benz