After a decade, Phil Bicker recently left his role at Instagram. As the communications manager creative editor, he had been part of the team that runs
@instagram, the app’s official Instagram account, shaping its editorial voice. With over 690 million followers, it’s the app’s most followed account, and was created to build community, filter the billions of images and videos shared on the app, and bring a curated, creative content experience to a broader global audience.
Phil’s work at @instagram has been intentionally focused on discovery. He has consistently used his position to bring to the surface and collaborate with emerging creatives. This is not unlike the work he did in the early 1990s when he was art director at The Face, where he championed the work of a new generation of photographers who would go on to become some of the most influential image makers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He was the first to commission Corinne Day, David Sims and Glen Luchford. Others like Nigel Shafran, Juergen Teller and Stéphane Sednaoui, he nurtured and collaborated with regularly in the embryonic stages of their development.
The photographs they produced came to define a generation through their documentary approach to fashion photography, depicting England’s disenchanted youth with Kate Moss as their poster girl. In 1993, Kate, shot by David Sims, was plastered on billboards across the world as the face of Calvin Klein underwear. What Phil had begun as a rejection of the era’s supermodels (prim, athletic bodies and 1980s glamour) and an embrace of what he saw happening around him in real life, had hit the mainstream.
The career trajectory of these particular photographers came to map out an editorial approach still followed in fashion today: create images that are unapologetically unique, share them with your community, get them published in an independent magazine, then wait for the campaign requests to come in. With Instagram, that ecosystem has been further enhanced, being used as a platform for all photographers, both emerging and established, to share their work with an international audience.
Until May this year, Phil sat right at the beginning of this process, collaborating with creatives for @instagram before they had been featured anywhere else; when they were still making content for themselves, their close friends and their quickly expanding communities. Until relatively recently, the only way to get noticed was through collaboration with magazines and brands. Today, people can put their work out there and gain huge followings without any official endorsement from the system.
In addition to The Face and his tenure at Instagram, Phil’s career has been expansive. He was creative director at The FADER, Vogue Hommes International Mode and Magnum Photos, worked on campaigns for Calvin Klein, Stüssy and Yohji Yamamoto, and was a senior photo editor at Time magazine. It is this gamut of experience that enabled him to go to Instagram and make sense of the wildly disparate content he encountered. Fashion has, in recent years, begun to commission more engaging content for Instagram’s ever-evolving format from a new generation of image makers, much like how the industry adopted the grit and grunge of the 1990s photography commissioned by Phil for the pages of The Face. The one thing that these two era-defining moments have in common? Phil. Right there, at the centre of it all.

Shonagh Marshall: What was Instagram like as a company when you first joined in 2015?
Phil Bicker: Very small. The staff for the whole company was tiny – about 300 people in total. On our community team there were literally only a handful of people working directly on shaping content for @instagram, and we were involved in the curatorial aspects of the account. I was hired by Pamela Chen and her team was a disparate band of creatives with distinctive perspectives and unexpected backgrounds, including photojournalist Teru Kuwayama – who had covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir – and photographer and curator Andrew Owen. We were there to work on a community-first strategy. Pamela herself had come from National Geographic, where she had launched @natgeo which would become the biggest Instagram account at the time. People like David Guttenfelder and a lot of other great photographers were getting eyes on their work because of it. My background hadn’t been a straight-line trajectory. Across my work as a creative director for independent magazines and mainstream fashion campaigns, or as a photo editor in the news and documentary space, I’d encountered a wide range of creatives and driven some unconventional creative paths. So for me to go into Instagram in a curatorial role at that time was something I felt would be a natural extension. Joining the team was like joining the Avengers. It was exciting and I was totally up for the challenge but I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.

What images did you encounter when you got there? What was the visual landscape like?
It was still exclusively a square-image format, photo-sharing app. Looking back now, it’s difficult to imagine how drastically its candy-coloured, choreographed aesthetic, and enablement of direct-to-audience content changed the cultural landscape. Its original form feels so innocent and limited in comparison to the complexity of today’s Instagram and the broader social media landscape. I’d come directly from working at Magnum Photos and Time magazine, with images from the wire; war photography that was really gritty. Suddenly I was in a world of cats and cupcakes – that was the language of Instagram. It was a positive space, but Instagram also ushered in a photographic aesthetic that was seen by some, particularly those working in legacy media, as superficial and somehow inferior. The Instagram app signalled a new frontier for photography. Professional photographers were conflicted at the time, they saw opportunity in directly reaching an audience themselves, but there were concerns that the app’s filters, aesthetic and the proliferation and explosion of UGC [user-generated content] would somehow contribute to or result in the death of the traditional or established photography ecosystem that sustained them.

Were people creating a new visual language for the format?
Yes. Every project I worked on, I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, hold on, let me reconnect my brain.’ I’d look at a load of images of pets, and then immediately up next I’m looking at work from someone in South America who’s doing a hybrid between Instagram’s new aesthetic and documentary photography. The subject matter and the ways the Instagram community were approaching things was very different. I had to ask, ‘Can I take the next step to understand what this is?’ My judgment was informed by the fact that I’d experienced a lot of things and pulled from a lot of different creative content sources in the past, so I wasn’t looking at the images one-dimensionally or from a single point of view. I was trying to find the nuances and determine what was good and what was bad. Someone’s making cupcakes, but who’s the best person making cupcakes? There’s definitely an art to that decision-making process, and a lot of it is intuitive. Most of it was photography at that point, there was very little video.

You held the title of communications manager creative editor at Instagram from 2018 until May this year. Tell me more about that role.
Pamela referred to me as Instagram’s first photo editor. There were similarities to the work I’d previously done as a photo editor, curator and art director in the magazine space, but at Instagram it felt I was doing all of these jobs simultaneously. It was everything everywhere all at once. There was no discernible rhythm to the content I was exposed to. I found myself shifting between skill sets unconsciously, as I worked through these divergent projects on a case-by-case basis, in an effort to find appropriate creative solutions. Initially my role was to establish the visual voice for international accounts in different regions like Japan, Brazil and Germany. Then from 2018, I transitioned to the main global @instagram account. There I edited and curated content for regular series, like the user-generated content #WHP (weekend hashtag project) and the regular pet account series #WeeklyFluff. I also developed new series ideas and formats including themed weekly creative curations for #ThisWeekOnInstagram, and a weekly location-based series #HelloFrom which featured surprising travel destination imagery from around the world.
In 2020, to start the year, I conceived and curated #2020Vision, a series of 20 up-and-coming culturally relevant people to watch out for in the year ahead. The project included creatives working across a broad range of disciplines: advocacy, art, comedy, music, dance, fashion and more. There was even an astronaut. In the early stages most of the work was curatorial, surfacing and editing content to represent creative accounts. The process ultimately became more focused on making original content in collaboration with the creators we featured.

How do you discover people? When you were at The Face or other magazines, people were coming to you with their book, but now that the tables have turned, I presume you are proactively searching for people. Are you scrolling? Are you looking at hashtags? I am a little overwhelmed thinking about it.
People weren’t literally knocking on our door at Instagram as they were when I had worked at independent magazines, but they were able, at least in the early days, to have their work found by @instagram by using hashtags that corresponded to regular series. When I started, we’d also look at the accounts we already knew were strong, including accounts we’d featured, and then look at the accounts they were following. That would often lead to other people we considered feature-worthy. Now it’s a little bit more nuanced and also more expansive. We use Explore and other tools, but there’s still a lot of time-consuming labour and, yes, there’s a lot of scrolling too. You’re looking through literally hundreds of thousands of things, you can spend weeks scrolling and only come up with half a dozen accounts that are strong enough to share. Say it’s #OutfitOfTheDay: the clothes are interesting, but then it’s also the way the video is being made or edited. There are multiple things the creator is doing that show not only their style, but their interests and their personality through self-expression.

Give me an example of someone you found.
One of the recent finds was Urmila: @ursk8kid, a 19-year-old Indian female skateboarder. Her account just turned up on my Explore. She is so incredible. Beyond her obvious skateboarding prowess she has an innate sense of style, a genuine relatability and such a positive energy. I DM’d her and asked, ‘Would you be interested in doing an interview and making a reel?’ In this case we were collaborating with a creator and they were choosing to make something new that we could feature. We had a Zoom call and she was amazing, and she made an original Reel for us to feature. The difference at Instagram from a lot of other work I had done is that I had agency not only in the creative direction and execution, but in the choices of who and what I featured. That’s a huge responsibility and a huge challenge, and one that I really wanted to respond to. I’m thinking of the theme, I’m picking the people to feature and then I’m working on the edit and deciding which images I’m going to use. I feel I brought a lot of people to the account that might not have ever had the opportunity to land on there.

I am sure for many people it transformed their lives being featured on @instagram.
Yeah, but it’s the same as with those photographers back in the day at The Face or at The FADER. We’re not ‘discovering’ them, we’re just platforming them. We’re giving them a place to showcase their work. I never say I ‘discovered’ anybody. I would say that I was there and I gave them the opportunity to reach a bigger audience or to express themselves in the way they wanted to, and that’s important in its own way, as not everyone thinks like that. You need to have a vision that’s open-minded enough to adopt and encourage things that are not necessarily fully formed or for that matter even your personal taste. My natural instinct is to see something and go, ‘Oh my God, what is that?’, but also to ask, ‘Is that interesting or not?’

I have been wondering if Instagram is in fact the world’s largest magazine. Every person has a chance to share their vision and what interests them, each account is like a column or story according to them. This could be fashion, food, art, something else cultural, or it could just be pictures of their kids or their pet.
It is, but it’s more than that, because it’s more connected than any magazine could be. It can get into everybody’s home, it can get on everybody’s phone; you can make something omnipresent. The @instagram account can take something really niche and bring it to 690 million followers. In the 1980s and 1990s people would pick up The Face because they wanted to discover something new. They wanted to find out what was interesting at the time, from a source that had integrity. @instagram has the opportunity to do that one million fold, or six hundred million fold.

How is Instagram as a format different to that of a magazine?
Instagram is not a curated end product like a magazine is – it’s a point of discovery, a jumping-off point. It’s like going to the magazine store. You decide which issue or publication you’re going to pick up, but Instagram is not the magazine itself.

What was your strategy to bring an editorial voice to @instagram?
With millions of images on the platform there needed to be some intentionality in where we were steering the @instagram curation, but like the early days of The Face we weren’t looking for a homogeneous outcome. There was still room for nuance, different perspectives and continual evolution. Although there was lighter #WeeklyFluff pet content and unexpected UGC creative back then. There was also a lot of documentary photography. For example, the first project I worked on was with @krisannejohnson, an American photojournalist. Some of the things that fundamentally changed @instagram were things I didn’t necessarily work on, for example featuring public figures, like Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga. That is the language that built and built on itself. Gradually, the format of the app changed, it went from square photos to other formats, to videos, DMs, Stories, then Reels. It was always the product that was driving the change of format. Everything that Instagram has done to evolve has been for relevance. And when the product changed and new things were introduced, it had a lot of impact on the way people put content together and leveraged the platform in different ways. From this pressure to present a perfect aesthetic, it went much more lo-fi. You’ve got TikTok, Snapchat, and all these other apps influencing the way that Instagram had to grow. It couldn’t just stay as a square photo, candy-coloured land, or it would’ve been dead by now.

A through line in your work seems to be that you are responding to the times. Is this a conscious approach?
My interests and contribution to Instagram were quite particular to picking up on things I’d done in the past and applying that mentality to what I was doing there. It wasn’t the same kind of content or format, but I could still bring the same mindset. For example, the idea of what Kate Moss represented in 1990, when I commissioned her breakout cover story for The Face shot by Corinne Day. It was the time of the supermodel. They were inaccessible and there was a pressure to be perfect. They were shot in ways where they were put on a pedestal, shot in very heroic ways. There was no sense of who they really were on a human level. You could recognise them, ‘That’s Tatiana, that’s Naomi, that’s Linda.’ But you didn’t ever see anybody on the street looking like that. That look didn’t exist. Not in the world I lived in, at least. The Face was a British, youth-oriented magazine that fundamentally focused on music, culture and style rather than fashion. Kate represented that demographic. She was 16 years old. She was natural. She was short: five foot seven. That story brought personality and relatability to the fashion model, which hadn’t happened since the 1960s with someone like Twiggy. With Kate it was like a breath of fresh air. There she was, smiling, laughing, giggling, wearing her own clothes – well, a lot of people thought they were her own clothes, but they were actually stylist Melanie Ward’s and Corinne Day’s second-hand stuff and Birkenstocks.
It was the same with all the photographers I worked with: David Sims, Nigel Shafran, Corinne. They’re all grouped together when people look back, but the reason that I worked with them was because they all had – like others I gave early commissions to, including Juergen Teller and Stéphane Sednaoui – a very individual, unique and authentic perspective on the world. I felt they were bringing something distinctive to the table. The mainstream fashion industry initially resisted rather than embraced the moment. They didn’t understand it. They felt threatened and wanted to quash it. But then Margiela and other designers were doing similar things with fashion: deconstructing clothes, creating stuff that looked almost vintage. Then came grunge music and the whole thing was like a groundswell. There was a British Vogue cover, which I remember distinctly, of Linda Evangelista shot by Nick Knight with ring flash, like Helmut Newton used to use. The tagline said, ‘Glamour is Back.’ This riposte failed to quell the momentum of a youthful rebellion and ultimately the industry was forced to welcome in the new protagonists. Soon the emerging generation of stylists and photographers who had up to this point developed and showcased their own personal vision on the margins, and through the pages of independent magazines like The Face, found themselves working for fashion’s most prestigious editorial and advertising clients. Their work was relatable, and that’s something that I was able to identify and apply when it came to Instagram years later.

Do you think there is a similarity in how brands and mainstream media are embracing the creatives you feature on @instagram? In a similar way to how they commissioned the photographers you championed in the 1990s soon after they appeared in The Face?
I’m sure it happens, but it’s a little more nuanced and difficult to trace a direct lineage nowadays. In 2020, Calvin Klein did a CK One advert featuring young activists, including Quannah ChasingHorse, @quannah.rose, an indigenous model who we’d featured on @instagram. At the time, she and a lot of other advocates and activists were using their voice for societal change, and her presence on social media would have helped build her cultural capital and likely led to her being recognised by Calvin. It’s natural that with both public figures and regular users on the platform, @instagram would feature content from both segments and tap into audience engagement and brand building aspects, too. My own interests at both ends of this scale – and also at their intersection – have always been more based in the idea of discovery: emerging voices, individual self-expression, representation and/or community building. This editorial ethos very much aligns with that of The FADER, where I worked as creative director between 2004 and 2010, which gave many established artists like M.I.A., The White Stripes, Kanye, Nicki Minaj and Drake their first covers when they were relative unknowns. At @instagram, whether they are a musician (@flowerovlove), an actor (@lizethselene), or advocate like Quannah, for me a subject’s style and attitude always subconsciously come into play.

The fashion industry was slow to embrace social media and an online approach in general. Why?
They weren’t the only ones. Legacy print media, publications like Time, also didn’t adapt quickly enough and lost advantage. It’s like when Kodak didn’t embrace digital photography. There’s this idea that you’re so big that you can survive anything. But the truth of it is: if you don’t change with the times and adapt, you miss opportunities to grow and remain relevant. It’s likely to be the same with AI, which is so expansive. We have to evolve.

Fashion has in some respects embraced these new forms of content being made on social media. Do you think there is more openness to what fashion means today as a result?
Some of the creators that I’ve platformed on @instagram are not purely fashion creators. There’s a bridge with other interests, and that’s what makes them distinctive. Someone might be a fashion creator who is a dancer, or uses comedy, or is into sports. They might be multi-hyphenate, use video edits, dance, and be interested in vintage clothing, but the primary reason to feature them is because they’re uniquely themselves and they’re bringing something that’s distinctive to the table. The thing to recognise is that today’s youth culture is different. Whereas in the days of The Face and before, it was a tribal thing. If you liked punk music, you dressed a certain way; you knew what you were and you dressed accordingly. Nowadays, youth culture is less dictated. Music streaming services have played a major role in how we consume music too, there’s all these Reels and TikTok videos that go viral. The music for those videos can be some nostalgic thing from 20 or 30 years ago, or it could be something from right now. Kids today, they’re not conditioned by the idea that they can only like a particular type of music, they can only like a particular style of clothing. Take #OutfitOfTheDay on Instagram or TikTok. It’s someone going through their wardrobe, but they’re not a punk all the way through, they’re not simply goth or emo, they’ve got different things going on. It is the same with music, you don’t listen to a whole album, you might take your favourite track from here and there and make a playlist, and that playlist can go from rock and roll, to hip-hop, to doo-wop, to whatever.

It seems that through Instagram, people are able to define fashion or style on their own terms, making it more cross-cultural than ever before.
It dissolves the boundaries for people. They don’t need to be restricted in terms of being only in fashion, they can branch out. But when it comes to the commercial world, there are similar connections and the mainstream has leveraged that – like Pharrell at Louis Vuitton. There are those crossovers that are really omnipresent in the world of the mainstream as well. All the mainstream magazines take actors or musicians and they style them to the heavens with all the credits they need for the advertisers. But that’s a very different thing. My interest is still in the idea of the individual-self expression and uniqueness. Style rather than fashion.

What creators did you collaborate with at @instagam that felt true to themselves and relevant?
@a1jewel0310. She creates make-up art and also designs fashion. These designs are always evolving. Initially I saw some painted make-up looks she made based on her Chinese heritage; she is from the Kam ethnic group. Then a year later, her work had evolved to intricate, elaborate sculptural paper masks. Her work is very visual, it’s graphic, unusual and creative. She’s got a distinctive look and aesthetic and the way she shoots stuff outside of her make-up work is distinctive too. There might be some selfie style images of her shot on the street, but the way she presents the images is interesting. It’s in two panels cut vertically or horizontally and there’s a sequence in a carousel. If you look at her profile grid, it’s cohesive and it just feels like her thing. There’s variety in it, it’s quite considered even when it feels random, and the images are raw and accessible. They’re not – even when they’re straight portraits of her with the make-up – how it would look if it was photographed by a beauty photographer with all the right studio lighting. There’s something very organic about it. Another person is @ines.alpha who does 3D digital make-up. I first featured these creators some time ago, and also collaborated with them again for a beauty event which extended @instagram to IRL. These are things that I wouldn’t have seen in the 1990s, there was nothing quite like that going on back then – Leigh Bowery’s emergence from the London club scene and his extraordinary art and life being a slightly different but notable exception.
Reels have expanded the creative scope for self-expression, naturally paving the way for a more expansive, multi-hyphenate approach. More recently, I’ve been drawn to and collaborated with more relatable Reels creators whose distinctive styles seamlessly blend fashion sensibility, personality and aesthetic. Examples include @ava_ark’s vintage looks paired with unfussy, short snappy video edits; @kittylever’s whimsical ‘be your own muse’ vignettes, and @jaclynsth’s student lifestyle cooking content – all of which integrate fashion to varying degrees, but in innovative, non-traditional ways. These accounts, and others that cross-pollinate style with other interests like sport or music, signal a breaking down of boundaries and reflect a more authentic and accessible approach to fashion, which, in its own way, is as refreshingly raw, natural, and honest as the early work of the photographers I first worked with at The Face.

All of these creators are making all parts of the images, from taking the photographs, making the films, styling, sometimes making clothes and props. This is a new form of creativity in fashion that sits apart from the rigid idea of ‘fashion photography’. In terms of fashion photography in a more traditional sense, who do you think is using Instagram in an interesting way?
Instagram’s full of photographers and some of them have disjointed accounts. They’re full of tear sheets, they use it almost like it’s their website. But there are people like Maya, @stolenbesos. She just sets out a mood which shows you where she’s coming from in terms of photography. It just gives a vibe. I think that’s interesting. When people understand what Instagram is, they understand how to put their work out there. There are other photographers, like Jack Davison, who’s more established in the fashion world. When you look at his website and then you look at his Instagram account, it makes sense. It’s him. You can see his aesthetic, it’s considered. So you can be on the margins like @stolenbesos, or you can be someone who’s started in an art space, or, like Jack Davison, as a documentary or portrait photographer, and ended up crossing into the world of high fashion. Jack is more in the traditional lineage of what you expect of great photography, echoing the innovative, exploratory aesthetic of colour pioneers like Saul Leiter, and @stolenbesos is somewhere closer to what Juergen and Corinne were doing in the 1990s. A bit more lo-fi, a little less perfect.
Then there’s image makers working at the intersection of photography and AI, like @salometrz, who is really interesting. When it comes to AI, there’s also Simon Foxton who has moved into working in that visual space. Simon was a stylist at i-D back when I was at The Face. His Instagram account @simonfoxton is amazing. It’s all AI imagery, fabrications of nostalgia, conceptual takes on the things that have always informed his work like youth culture and gay male imagery. They’re on the edge of being believable, but they’re fantastical. That work is super interesting to me, because it’s not photography. It’s informed by photography and it fuels photography, but it’s AI.

Do you think being a content creator today is equivalent to being a fashion photographer in decades past?
I don’t know if there is a direct like-for-like comparison to be drawn between being a content creator today and being a fashion photographer. That feels too limiting. The creator economy is far broader and connects to a multitude of disciplines, and the lines are continually blurring and expanding all the time.

There are people who have had successful careers as a result of social media, people who may not have broken through in the traditional media landscape. How do you think Instagram has changed the way people are able to build their brand?
There are a lot of brands that were made by using Instagram in different ways. On the app, creators are able to start their journey on the margins, set out their stall and build as independents without compromising their vision, whether that’s in fashion, as a hair or make-up artist, designer, stylist, photographer or model – like those I have already mentioned, or others like @kaprisun_kid, @tomikono_wig and @mayaventour, or in other creative fields. Instagram enables direct-to-audience connection, not only in a passive sense as a delivery tool for content visibility but via DMs as an active conduit for creative collaboration, community building and business opportunity. Instagram has enabled influencers to build cultural capital. I feel like a brand like Skims would not exist if it wasn’t for Instagram. But on a much more interesting level for me are the small creators and brands. There’s somebody I featured, her name is Shy, @sl33zyskiz. She just turned 21, but she was 18 or 19 when we featured her. I featured her because I just loved the way she dressed. She had great style. Japanese street style-influenced, her hair was amazing, she wore baggy jeans and belts and had lots of little tattoos. Then a year or two later, because I was following her, I saw she was putting out a clothing line. It was through Instagram, and she would direct you to a website from her account where she was posting about limited-edition drops and that she would be selling at a store on the Lower East Side. I contacted her again and asked if we could do another feature.
It’s nice when you see someone who’s expanding their creative output and they’re using Instagram to tell people how they’re evolving. Offgod, @yalocaloffgod, a young Hong Kong-based artist and designer, has gained recognition for his innovative work, including 3D-printed headphone sculptures and wearable art pieces. What’s remarkable about his journey is that it started with DMs to creatives he admired, like artist Takashi Murakami and Pharrell. Both offered support and encouragement, with Murakami even reposting Offgod’s artwork on his Instagram account, helping launch his career.

Spending a lot of time on the @instagram account for this interview the thing that strikes me is all the content is so entertaining. Yet the majority of legacy media are sharing images, text and video on Instagram that have been made for print or their website.
It seems counterintuitive to me. It doesn’t necessarily have as much impact as it could do if it was bespoke for the platform. But the other thing to say, is that a lot of stuff that is bespoke for the platform doesn’t speak in the language of the platform either. You see a lot of stuff out there which doesn’t feel fun or entertaining. It feels like there’s an old-media mentality that is then applied to social media or other online platforms that doesn’t make any sense. The mistake is not to live in the present and understand that ways of approaching things can be very different to the traditional and established ways people have approached things in the past. The mistake a lot of media companies and outlets make is the idea of telling people this is the one thing. This is the right answer. This is the thing to do. This is the choice you should make. Instagram enabled the democratisation of culture and content. AI signals the potential for further evolution. And I’ll be watching with curiosity and interest to see where that takes things, and then some.