instagram

#REALPHOTO
© Neil Turner. 2025

I have been toying with all sorts of social media for quite a while and my presence on any of them would best be categorised as “modest”. For the first time in my career I have been asked to actively engage with Instagram on behalf of a client and we have been discussing what sorts of hashtags should accompany any pictures that I post. I have been very keen to use something that makes it clear that mine are real pictures. Not adulterated, filtered, AI generated or in any other way the product of anything that would make a responsible photojournalist unhappy or even uncomfortable.

I did quite a bit of web-surfing before going onto a closed Facebook group made up of my peers and professionals whose opinions I respect and asking the question “what do other people do about marking their work out as AI FREE on social media posts?” There was a short but interesting discussion and one or two of my colleagues advised against my initial thought of #AIFREE on the grounds that it could be interpreted as being AI generated and/or free to use. The general consensus was to avoid the letters A and I altogether.

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Thirty-plus year old memory
Sir John Cassels – Chair of a Government Inquiry into post-sixteen education. Photographed at his home in south-west London. May 1991. Photo: ©Neil Turner

When I published this May 1991 portrait on my Instagram feed a couple of years ago I was shocked by the clarity of my memories of shooting it. A year or so after publishing it I was giving a talk to a wonderful group of people at a camera club who had invited me to come and show some work and tell some anecdotes and, once again, I remembered so much detail about the day and the pictures. The power of still images to evoke a time and a place is a wonderful thing. I thought that it would be good to share those memories again here and this is what I wrote underneath the post on Instagram:

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One more from the archive project
Professor Richard Dawkins, Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford. © NEIL TURNER/TSL. October 2001.

When I was posting an archive portrait a day to my instagram account during the COVID-19 lockdown I had about thirty images in my mind that were ‘must-have’ pictures that I remembered being something special. When I started to put to the set together two things surprised me;

  • Some of those thirty must-have pictures weren’t as good as my memory told me they were.
  • Quite a few others were available top take their place in the top thirty – either because they were way better than I had remembered or because I had totally forgotten about them.
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Magic moments – I’ve had a few
©Neil Turner/TSL | March 1997

Working with teams of photographers on big sports projects is one of my main sources of income these days. Get a bunch of photographers together and they will almost inevitably start to tell stories about what they’ve done and who they’ve met.

Recently a colleague mentioned my Instagram project from last year and how he had enjoyed seeing my early work. That lead to a discussion about how lucky we are to go places and to see things that the general public can’t or, at least can’t without spending a lot of money.

For me the places come second to the people.

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One hundred and eighty portraits later

A section of 180 of my portraits posted to Instagram during my project.

After six months and 180 portraits posted to Instagram and Facebook I find myself at a point where I’ve shown enough archive imperfect portraits for now. It’s nearly Christmas and it feels like the right time to hit the pause button on, what has been, a very enjoyable diversion from the woes of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, restrictions and the lack of new work on offer.

As I sit here and contemplate what has been good, bad and indifferent about posting so many of my favourites from 1988 to 2008 the temptation to perform some sort of statistical analysis has been quite strong and the parallel temptation to draw conclusions from the feedback has been stronger still. For now I am going to settle for some general impressions and some feelings that have struck me during the whole process so here’s a bullet-pointed list of some of them: (more…)

Imperfect Portraiture

Pascale Allotey, Professor in Race and Diversity at Brunel university in west London.© Neil Turner/TSL November 2005

I have had the title for this piece rattling around in my head for several weeks now but before I dive in I want to explain that it is about a certain style of editorial portraiture that appeals to me. It is equally important that nobody reading this thinks that I believe other forms of portrait photography are somehow inferior or are “less portraity”.

I suspect that every sentiment that you will read in this mini-essay will have been expressed somewhere on my blog at some point in time. After all, if you did a search for the word “portrait” on this site you would get hundreds of hits. From explaining the anguish of editing your own work to my definition of what is and is not a portrait. I have written about why this kind of photography speaks to me so loudly and so consistently but I have wanted for some time to bring all of those thoughts and impulses together. As always, there are two reasons for doing this; the first is to stimulate thought and debate amongst those who care to read it and secondly to help me further clarify my own opinions and, by doing so, make my own work better.

Of course there isn’t a strict set of rules about what constitutes a portrait. Back in 2011 I wrote this; (more…)

Archive Portraits on Instagram

Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer, photographed in her London studio after she had been celebrating with her team having won yet another design award. October 1990. Photo ©Neil Turner

Over the last few months I have been devoting an awful lot of my time to building up an archive of my professional work from when I left college in 1986. There are plenty of gaps and there have been lots of surprises – images and commissions that I had long forgotten and it occurred to me that my Instagram feed was looking a bit sorry for itself and so I started to add portraits that had something of a back story. That was a couple of weeks ago and there will be photographs on that feed that regular readers of this blog will recognise but, equally, there will be some very unfamiliar portraits that haven’t seen the light of day in many, many years. (more…)

Fascinated by Instagram but useless at it

Rain drops on the lens near Fisherman’s Walk. October 2019 ©Neil Turner

I just might be the worst user of Instagram amongst the photographic community. I don’t post new pictures often enough, I don’t go back through my archive and post interesting images from it often enough and I don’t interact with other people’s posts often enough either. Sometimes I have a real go at putting an effort in but I don’t seem to have the pictures, the patience or the attitude to keep it up.

That doesn’t stop me finding the whole thing quite fascinating. There are hundreds of quite brilliant images sitting in my feed as I type. I follow just over 600 people and businesses and between them they produce amazing content on a daily basis. I also have a couple of searches running permanently which give me an insight into just how bad and boring pictures that get posted can be. (more…)