Photos Still Matter on Brand Social
I interviewed the internet's favorite photo director Emily Keegin, who has worked at places like The Fader, Time, and Businessweek.
If Instagram’s best practices for a creator account are to use trending music, talk to the camera, post consistently, and tell a clear story—Emily Keegin has taken the opposite approach. That’s exactly what makes her such a great follow. When you see her name pop up in your IG Story tray, you know you are in for a treat. Her typo-filled, all-over-the-place, personality-filled IG Story breakdowns (rants? manifestos?) to her her 278K followers about contemporary photography are fascinating and singular.
Emily doesn’t really talk about brand social photography on her personal account (she’s more interested in breaking down the Christmas photo from The Kardashians or the Laila Gohar-ification of food photos), but that’s exactly why I wanted to chat with her for today’s newsletter.
When I think about some of my favorite brand social moments, despite the consistent pivot-to-video energy in the air, my mind often comes back to campaigns that were rooted in satisfying photography.
Emily has worked at places like The Fader, Time and Businessweek and understands how photography fits into editorial and marketing plans. I love the way she thinks and I hope it gets you to Slack your coworkers about the role photography plays in social.
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Rachel Karten: First, do you mind giving us a bit of background on yourself?
Emily Keegin: My bio usually says something like “I’m a photo director, editor and consultant based in Oakland, California”. All facts.
But people often want to know more. “what does that mean?” “But what do you DO?”
And so I say something crunchy like…
My job is to find the best way to tell a story photographically, and then execute that vision. Most often, this means hiring and directing a photographer and photographic team. Sometimes this means researching & finding existing images that suit the brief. TLDR I’m basically an art director who specializes in photography.
All Facts!
But honestly, the facts never seem quite right. The truth is, what I do, or rather, who i am, or rather, the thing that is at the crux of my work, is just an absolute obsession with photography. I spend most of my time trying to understand how photography works, how it shapes us, as individuals, citizens, and artists.
RK: How would you describe your relationship with social media? Do you follow a lot of brands there?
EK: I don’t tend to follow “brands”. Although… On the internet, everyone is sorta a brand. So… i guess I follow brands.
TBH I’ve completely fucked my algorithm by following politicians and a handful of news outlets. Big mistake. If you want to spend less time on instagram, i suggest following Donald Trump (I did for research & work). The algorithm consistently puts him on the top of my feed and it’s a real turn-off. Meta claims to downplay News and politics but I haven’t had that experience.
Before I messed everything up, my feed was mostly focused on the photo-industry. I saw what brands were doing through the agencies and photographers who they hire.
RK: What role do you think social media plays when it comes to photo direction trends? For example, I loved your recent breakdown of the Gohar World effect which feels, at least in part, social driven.
EK: I have the unpopular opinion that Social Media makes trends last longer.
Since social media platforms provide easily accessible performance data, creators and brands are incentivized to only post algorithm-tested images. Knowing what “works” means fewer people are interested in taking visual risks, resulting in long-term visual homogenisation.
I think people who claim that trends are “moving faster” due to social media have a warped sense of history. They also tend to mistake “micro trends” with “macro trends”.
Those who champion the theory of an expedited visual trend cycle often point to micro trends like last year’s obsession with bows. Remember? Bows on fruit? Bows on shoes? Bows on sleeves? Beginning in the fall of 2022 Bows were showing up everywhere. By spring 2023 they had fully saturated social media, becoming a viral trend. In September 2023, when the New York Times wrote, “Have We Officially Reached Peak Ribbon?” I assumed the bow-party was over. You know an internet-trend is cooked when the NYT writes about it. And in some ways, it was over. 1 year later, in September 2024, the internet has moved on to other things. Bows are still popping up, but only in terrestrial life. Naomi Osaka brought big bows to the U.S. Open. Bombas are selling bow-adorned socks and designers like Sandy Liang remain fully committed to the ribbon.
But there’s a difference between micro trends (like bows) and macro trends. Micro trends are small novelty gestures that are responding to much larger cultural, political or generational trends. These small gestures are merely byproducts of tectonic shifts in the culture and they tend to come and go quickly. In the case of Bows, this micro trend accompanied a cultural and political shift in the depiction and expectations of women and girls. It is not shocking that Bows, an accessory associated with traditional femininity and girlhood, arrived at the moment when feminism, the female body, and girlhood were being debated and recalibrated within the culture at large.
What does this look like? Millennial women are aging into motherhood and in the process rethinking their relationship with traditional female roles and work. In pop culture we see this manifest in a backlash to the “millennial girl boss” and the rise of the “trad wife”. Gen Z girls are in their teens & 20s. This is a generation that is larger and more on-line than millennials. They also have a different relationship with gender, identity, and girlhood and are finding ways to recast and reclaim traditional iconography. And let’s not underplay the political climate, where the overturning of roe has stripped women of the power to control their own bodies. This act is both infantilizing and old fashioned…just like bows.
TLDR
Micro trends move fast. Macro trends move slowly. Both move at roughly the same rate as they always have.
In photography recent trends are things like…
the color Red, a micro trend from 2023.
The Macro color trend is Bright primary colors. This trend stems from the limitations of the digital platform, back-lit screens, & social media. In 2024 Red was replaced with bright Green.
We’ve also seen a rather stubborn “golden hour” look for the last decade. This is a long lasting micro trend. The related macro trend is a return to “film photography” and the visual hallmarks of Kodak film.
In the last year ive seen the return of “bright flash”. But this “new” micro trend is still referencing our ongoing macro trend of traditional film photography.
RK: What other visual trends are you noticing specifically on brand social?
EK: The color green. Iphone photos that look raw & made with zero effort. No filter. Bright flash. Humor. Medieval vibes. Objects on white or off-white/ grey.
RK: Any visual trends you'd love to see go away?
EK: Objects on white or off-white/ grey.
Anything that references Tiktok & the Tiktok aesthetic.
RK: You've talked before about the difference between viewing photographs in a magazine spread vs on social media. I believe you were referencing the Juergen Teller W Magazine spread. When I worked at Bon Appétit Magazine it was always hard to take a visually interesting or beautiful spread and properly transfer it to a social story. It just never hit the same. How did you deal with this during your time at magazines? Would you work with the social team? Is it just sort of a hazard of the job that it might not translate as well digitally?
EK: I think digital and print are very different mediums with very different needs and limitations. The only way i’ve been able to work between these two mediums is by over-shooting.
My math is like this:
Images that work well on social media are all structured like magazine “covers”. - These are simple ideas rendered cleanly & shot vertically or square.
For a print story you only want/ need 1 “cover”, 1 “opener” (aka a second cover) and then a host of more complicated images that can tell the story over many pages. Also, a few horizontal images are helpful for some double page spreads.
So - to get enough images for social media, I ask photographers to go into every set-up assuming it might be a “cover”. The goal is to capture a few “solid” or “classic” cover options and then “keep going”. Once we have something “obvious”, I ask them to “get weird, break the frame, go nuts”. The result is usually a range of imagery that can work for both print and digital templates.
RK: I think a lot of social managers view a photo through an algorithmic lens. "This crop won't perform well because the algorithm likes up close photos", "The photo needs to be brighter because the algorithm favors bright colors", etc. On the one hand, you want a photo to be seen (get shown to people by the algorithm) and on the other hand you don't want to fuck up the original photo. Do you have any thoughts on balancing social "performance" with artistic integrity?
EK: If you’re trying to get people to stop scrolling and pay attention to your brand/idea/image, it’s best to stand out.
RK: Any photographers you're excited about right now that brands should work with? (My client CAVA recently worked with Sinna Nasseri which was really fun.)
EK: Chantel Anderson! Renell Medrano! Ariel Fisher! Caroline Tompkins! Ashley Markle! Sinna Nasseri! Annie Collinge! I went through a Paul Kooiker phase recently!
RK: It feels like we've been living in this neverending "pivot-to-video" world—first with Facebook and now with TikTok. Why is it important to keep investing and posting photography on social media? What do we lose when all we see are bite-size, short-form videos on these platforms?
EK: Pretend you live in a house. You love your house. It has 400 rooms with 400 doors. Behind doors 1-399 are rooms filled with people talking at you, mostly screaming about politics and Mormonism and dancing to Charli XCX. There are a few rooms that are mostly cats. It's fun, but very loud and after a while it can feel kinda claustrophobic. But then there's door number 400. The room behind door number 400 is quiet. The air is still. When you get to this room you take a breath, and sit down. You rest. You return to this room daily. You NEED this room.
If I were a brand, I'd want to be room number 400.
Photography is quiet. And when the world is screaming at you, there is tremendous power in stillness.
RK: To end, can I just rapid fire ask your thoughts on certain visual brand moments? Like quickfire Emily hot takes?
RK: Moving covers?
EK: These are so creepy and dumb. Love it 10/10
RK: Every brand trying to do Aimé Leon Dore-style photography?
EK: Quiet Luxury meets Quiet Quitting meets zzzzzzzzzzzzzz 3/10
RK: JACQUEMUS on IG?
EK: Big creative brains having fun with a budget 10/10
RK: Security camera-style photography?
EK: Anytime a non-professional camera shoots a commercial, i’m in 🫡 9/10
RK: TSA bins?
EK: Not gonna lie- I love the bins lol
RK: Thanks so much Emily!
Appreciate having something to read that genuinely made me stop what I was doing to fully focus and soak it in. Amazing job and thank you for the new knowledge and exposure to Emily Keegin!
Loved this one. Thanks for this!!!