Even so, RISD students were grounded in the visual arts, and trained to develop an eye for subject matter, color and composition, which carried over into their personal photography, said Whitney Bedford, 45, a painter in Los Angeles who graduated in 1998 who has submitted to the feed. “It was an art school, so more than our cohorts at Brown, we were the ones with the cameras,” she said. “But there wasn’t the self-awareness of today. It was about capturing the rhythm of life, not the pose.”
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“And don’t forget,” Mr. Atkatz said, “you didn’t even know what the damned picture was going to look like for like two weeks. You would snap 24 pictures and then you hope some of them were good. And then you’d get it back and there would be one or two good photos, and a bunch of junk.”
This explains why so many of the shots on the feed are either underexposed, overexposed or framed as if the photographer were blindfolded. But that is the spirit of the enterprise, as well as the era. “That detritus,” Mr. Atkatz said, “is the good stuff.”
Art School Looked Like a Lot of Fun In the ’90s
A homage to a predigital era has popped up, as a crowdsourced art project that lives, paradoxically, on Instagram.
See also – Auggie’s Photo Album – Smoke