Pics or It Didn’t Happen memorializes the banned images of Instagram - Friends of Friends / Freunde von Freunden (FvF)

Pics or It Didn’t Happen memorializes the banned images of Instagram

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The next time you’re caught up in an endless social media scroll, it might be worth reflecting on what you don’t get to see. What kind of images are allowed to take up digital space, and which get the cut?

Pics or It Didn’t Happen began, fittingly, on social media. In 2015, Arvida Byström sent a tweet calling for a ceremony to commemorate the world’s deleted Instagram posts. In reply, Molly Soda suggested that they make a book. So, from the ashes of this digital graveyard, Molly and Arvida began a shared ritual. They appealed to their collective 207,600 Instagram followers: send us your nudes. Send, also, your bloodied underwear, your body hair, your self-inflicted scars. Anything that breached Instagram’s community guidelines, that was just “too much” for social media.

Instagram prohibits violent, unlawful, discriminatory or nude images on their platform. Pics or It Didn’t Happen, however, is almost entirely made up of the latter category. Sometimes these are explicit—nipples and butt selfies—and sometimes more abstract, perhaps close-ups of amorphous skin folds. The images are contextualized by a series of essays, including one by Chris Kraus of I Love Dick fame.

© Arvida Byström
© Aleia Murawski
© Rin Johnson
© Molly Soda
© Amalia Ulman

The book troubles the idea that this kind of censorship unconditionally protects us. At times, Instagram’s ban-hammer seems to strike entirely at random. One image, by artist Isaac Kariuki, shows a figure in a green hijab and wrap-around sunglasses, a phone clamped to their ear. Other images show women fully dressed. It is impossible to figure out how these images violated community standards.

As a collective project, Pics or It Didn’t Happen is completely absorbing. These ephemeral digital images—lost to the algorithms—are given posterity in print. In a bizarre turn of events, these images will now last longer, and be returned to more often, than had they not been removed at all.

© Issac Kariuki
© Arvida Byström
© Stina Wolter
© Ser Brandon-Castro Serpas

Pics or It Didn’t Happen is edited by Arvida Byström and Molly Soda, and published by Prestel. Check out Arvida’s Instagram here, and Molly’s here—both of which are, of course, in their censored incarnations. For more information about the book, visit Prestel’s website here. You can also read Instagram’s community guidelines here.

If you’re interested in books, zines and magazines, take some time to delve into our Print Matters archive here on FvF.

Text: Siobhan Leddy

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