The Trials and Tribulations of an Instagram Artist: A Cemetery Photographer's Journey

 

The Beginning

I've been on IG, as a lot of us call it, since 2010. Right from the start. When I got my first iPhone. My then-wife was a performer and used it to promote her work along with all the other relevant social media platforms at the time. It was just a novelty to me. I didn't even own a real camera, just a cell phone.

I had been without pro gear for a few years after selling everything in 2007 while still in the military. My son convinced me that the iPhone had the best camera at the time and the integration into the iOS ecosystem was the most attractive feature. I was all in. I got the iPhone 4 and soon after an iPad 1. Not long after, I had a MacBook Air. I drank the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid in one gulp. No regrets.

I quickly found that iPhone photography was a legit endeavor and had no shame in being a once-pro photographer who didn't own an actual camera and instead shot everything from a phone. It took a while before I graduated from snapshots of my dogs and cats and wife to actually composing real shots for the sake of artistry. From documentation to creation.

Finding My Voice

By 2016, I was pretty invested and started posting cemetery photos, dark nature content, and my own poetry. I found the poetry was well received. The words resonating where the images hadn't. However, I could not break through the glass ceiling of about 300 followers. Stuck at an altitude I couldn't explain.

I had one IG friend who was a fan of my work and had about 10,000 followers. I was in awe. I asked how he achieved that, and he stated: engagement, regular posting, and luck. The holy trinity of social media success. He actually said he wanted to start pissing people off and watch his count fall. To me, that seemed absurd. I guess when you have it all, it comes with a certain amount of contempt. Or freedom. Hard to tell the difference.

The Pattern

My challenge has always been longevity. I make an account, and six months later I delete everything and make a new one. Build and destroy. Create and obliterate. I've had this love-hate relationship with social media since the MySpace days of 2003. Back then, I climbed to 1,000 followers when that was considered influencer status. I loved the ability to fully customize my page with HTML, and plus, I was a raving lunatic leftist, and that bad-boy-wrong-side-of-the-tracks thing always seemed to excite people. Rebellion as currency.

Back to the present. I really got into publishing my cemetery photography on IG in August 2024. Since then, I've redone the account from scratch three times after about a year prior showcasing my photojournalism photography, which never saw more than maybe 400 followers. Each restart a small death. Each rebuild a resurrection that never quite takes.

I have been shooting in cemeteries for forty years. It's not a bandwagon I just jumped on. This isn't a trend I'm chasing. But even with the great experience I have and the skill for the art, I'm having a tough time growing. Decades of expertise meaning nothing in an algorithm's calculations.

The Numbers Game

I currently have 2,447 followers at the time of writing this. I lost about sixty followers after deciding to make a couple of politically flavored posts, which was stupid because I don't care to see such things on other artists' pages. Art should unite, not divide, in my opinion. Though apparently my opinion costs sixty people.

This all leads to a recent conversation with an IG and real-life friend of mine who photographs mainly pet cemeteries. She has overnight cornered the proverbial market on the genre. She has blown the hell up! I am so proud of her. She went from maybe a thousand or more followers than I had to a dozen times that in one month! She found her niche, and she's enjoying the fruits of her labors of love. Lightning striking exactly where she stood.

But can we all aspire to this success? Can lightning be summoned?

The Investigation

I have an analytical mind, and by my profession in the real world, I use my investigative skills to try to find answers to the questions that plague me. Why do some fail and others succeed in this game? And why do others remain sedentary and seem to go nowhere? What invisible forces determine who rises and who doesn't?

Another conversation with another IG friend who has an account centered around self-portraits alongside professional model work provided more clues. She's gorgeous and has quality content. She seems to post pretty regularly, but she only has 800 more followers than I do! What's going on when beautiful models aren't doing much better than my old ugly mug? Beauty not guaranteeing success the way you'd think it would.

She said sex sells, and she doesn't provide that. While she may show some skin, her content is a lot tamer than what a lot of women are showing on this site. She also told me it's all about consistency and staying relevant by constant posting. Learning to master the algorithm. Dancing with an invisible partner whose steps keep changing.

She summed it up by saying, "It's a lot of work."

And so it is. More work than anyone admits.

The Reality of the Game

Even the beautiful women in various states of undress are working hard to achieve their desired aesthetic, promote themselves zealously, master the algorithm, and generate that all-important content. You have to analyze what works and what doesn't. You have to post at strategic times. You have to engage constantly. You have to ride trends while maintaining authenticity. You have to study analytics like you're preparing for a final exam. Every post a calculation. Every caption a strategy.

And some even buy followers.

Yes, there are vendors that sell "followers" for a fee. The way I look at it, that's a business investment. If you have the money and can swallow your pride, then it makes good marketing sense. People are more likely to be attracted to and follow an account that has 100,000 followers over one that has 1,000. It's just basic herd mentality. Numbers breeding more numbers.

I can't do it, though. I want to be liked for what I'm producing and have people voluntarily support my work with their follows and likes instead of PayPaling someone in Ukraine thirty dollars to supply me with 1,000 followers that either aren't even real people or don't care about cemetery photography. Authenticity as handicap. Integrity as obstacle.

The Variables

So what separates those who succeed from those who don't? From my investigation, it seems to come down to several factors:

Consistency: The algorithm rewards regular posting. Miss a few days and you're basically starting over in terms of reach. Momentum lost is momentum impossible to regain.

Niche specificity: My friend who does pet cemeteries found a very specific niche that no one else was dominating. I'm competing with thousands of cemetery photographers. She found a door that was open. I'm knocking on one crowded with bodies.

Timing and trends: Catching a trend at the right moment can catapult you forward. Missing it means staying stagnant. Being early is the same as being late.

Engagement: It's not enough to post. You have to comment on other accounts, respond to every comment on your posts, use stories, reels, all of it. Presence demanding omnipresence.

Luck: Sometimes the algorithm just decides to favor you. Or a celebrity shares your work. Or you go viral for reasons you can't predict or replicate. Divine intervention in digital form.

Psychology: Understanding what makes people follow. Pretty faces, shocking content, aspirational lifestyles. These all trigger different psychological responses that drive follows. The human mind reduced to predictable patterns.

Business acumen: Treating it like a business, investing money in ads, buying followers, using analytics tools. All things many artists resist but that clearly work. Art becoming commerce whether we like it or not.

The Love-Hate Relationship

And here I am, with my pattern of building and destroying, my resistance to playing the game fully, my forty years of experience that somehow doesn't translate to Instagram success, my 2,447 followers that feel simultaneously like an achievement and a failure. Both proof of something and proof of nothing.

I delete accounts because I get frustrated with the algorithm, with the performative nature of it all, with the way art gets reduced to metrics and engagement rates. Then I come back because I genuinely want to share my work, connect with people who appreciate cemetery photography, document these sacred spaces before they're lost. The push and pull never resolving.

It's exhausting. It's demoralizing. It's occasionally thrilling when a post does well. It's confusing when you do everything "right" and nothing happens. It's frustrating when you see others succeed while you plateau. Sisyphus pushing a boulder made of pixels and metrics.

The Conclusion

The bottom line is: I ain't quitting my day job, probably ever, for the IG bonus payments in my bank account. But I will still continue to do what I love. Even if the money doesn't follow. Even if the followers don't multiply. Even if the algorithm never favors me.

Because at the end of the day, I've been photographing cemeteries for forty years not because it was going to make me Instagram famous, but because I genuinely love these spaces. I love the art, the history, the stories carved in stone. I love preserving memories of places that are slowly being forgotten. This love predating social media by decades.

Instagram is just a tool, albeit a frustrating one. It's a way to share that love with others who might appreciate it. Whether that's 300 followers or 30,000, the work remains the same. The sacred ground doesn't care about my follower count. The monuments don't need validation from the algorithm. The angels don't check their analytics.

So I'll keep shooting. Keep posting. Keep deleting and restarting, probably. Keep having that love-hate relationship with social media that started back in 2003 on MySpace and will likely continue until whatever platform comes next. The pattern repeating because patterns are what I know.

Because this isn't really about Instagram success. It's about doing what you love and hoping that occasionally, someone else loves it too. It's about making beauty from sorrow. Meaning from stone. Art from absence.

That's enough. It has to be. It always has been.