A growing corner of Instagram combines a love of reading with hyper-stylized photography – but does it reduce books to mere objects?
A pink blanket goes with everything: Jane Austen classics, a queer young-adult romcom, fantasy novel Six of Crows. Jordan Hickey’s version is crocheted, made by her grandmother, and appears in most photos on her Instagram account pagetravels, where it’s paired with various books to evoke a sense of tantalizing coziness. Wouldn’t you like to be here right now, her photos imply, cuddled up with this blanket and this mug of coffee, with nothing else on your to-do list aside from reading the new novel Frankly In Love, out today?
Hickey is a part of “bookstagram”, the corner of Instagram combining a love of books with stylized, eye-catching photos, to the delight of large fanbases. The bookstagram tag has been used on over 35m Instagram posts, and the more popular bookstrammers have upwards of 100,000 followers (for comparison, the Instagram for the New York Times book section has about 69,000 followers.) There are enough people joining bookstagram that a slew of articles have cropped up, advising would-be bookstagrammers on best practice, how to manage Instagram’s “pesky algorithm” and the best budget-friendly props. Some accounts focus on old books, or books by authors of color, many play with elaborate staging.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2mddZaN
