Secret behind that picture-perfect instagram photo revealed

Welly Sombra Rodrigues, a 35-year-old French teacher, loves to travel. After the pandemic forced him to offer his language lessons virtually, he seized the moment, moving from Brazil to Europe, where he could hop on trains to new cities to his heart’s delight, all of which he documented on Instagram.

This month, a photo he took in Ireland for his more than 7,000 Instagram followers went viral. But he didn’t realise it until a friend messaged him, pointing him to a news article about “The Follower,” a digital art project that showed just how much can be captured by webcams broadcasting from public spaces — and how surprising it can be for those who are unwittingly filmed by them. The artist had paired Instagram photos with video footage that showed the process of taking them.

The artist had not included the Instagram users’ names or handles, but Rodrigues’ friends recognised him. In Rodrigues’ case, a webcam operated by a company called EarthCam caught the effort that had gone into a seemingly casual photo of him leaning against the distinctive bright-red entryway of the Temple Bar in Dublin.

He tried a few different angles and poses, did a minor outfit change and eventually added a prop — a pint of pricey beer from the famous pub. Articles about the project incorrectly described the subjects of the piece, including Rodrigues, who goes by @avecdavidwelly on Instagram, as influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. But most of them were just typical social media users, with far smaller audiences.

“I was completely shocked,” Rodrigues said in a Zoom interview. “I wasn’t expecting that someone was recording me.” The artist behind “The Follower,” Dries Depoorter, said his project demonstrates both the artifice of images on social media and the dangers of increasingly automated forms of surveillance. “If one person can do this, what can a government do?” Depoorter, 31, said. Depoorter, who is based in Ghent, Belgium, came up with the idea for “The Follower” over a month ago, while researching privately installed cameras in public places that he might use for a different art project. While watching a live online feed from Times Square, he saw a woman taking pictures of herself for “a long time.” Thinking she might be an influencer, he tried to find the product of her extended shoot among Instagram photos recently geo-tagged to Times Square.

He came up empty but that got him thinking. The 24/7 broadcast that Depoorter watched — titled “Live From NYC’s Times Square!” — was provided by EarthCam, a New Jersey company that specialises in real-time camera feeds. EarthCam built its network of livestreaming webcams “to transport people to interesting and unique locations around the world that may be difficult or impossible to experience in person,” according to its website. Founded in 1996, EarthCam monetises the cameras through advertising and licensing of the footage.

Depoorter realised that he could come up with an automated way to combine these publicly available cameras with the photos that people had posted on Instagram. So, over a two-week period, he collected EarthCam footage broadcast online from Times Square in New York, Wrigley Field in Chicago and the Temple Bar in Dublin.

Rand Hammoud, a campaigner against surveillance at the global human rights organisation Access Now, said the project illustrated how often people are unknowingly being filmed by surveillance cameras, and how easy it has become to stitch those movements together using automated biometric-scanning technologies.