Platform Grief: Instagram, Analogue Photography, and the Loss of a Community

Platform Grief

Instagram, Analogue Photography, and the Loss of a Community

A Conversation between Assunta Ruocco and Jennifer Good

This open session considers the relationship between photography, grief, and the digital platforms through which photographic images are circulated and encountered. Assunta Ruocco will reflect on a particular moment in Instagram’s history when analogue photography communities flourished through hashtags, curated accounts, and networks of photographers sharing in an online conversation, and on the sense of loss accompanying the gradual disappearance of those conditions.

Ruocco approaches this history through her ongoing practice and research around Our Days of Gold, an Instagram-based artwork begun in 2017, alongside a wider interest in how this brief period of photographic culture might be historicised and archived. “Platform grief”, a term that emerged in conversation with Jennifer Good, offers a way of thinking about what it means to mourn not only the disappearance, or degradation of a platform itself, but the changes to the relations and forms of community it once enabled.

Good’s research has examined photography as a means of seeing, remembering, bearing witness, and responding to loss, from photographic responses to September 11 to more recent work on screen-mediated death and mourning during the Covid 19 pandemic. Bringing these perspectives together, the conversation will consider social media as both a site for the expression of grief and as an object of grief.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

ASSUNTA RUOCCO

Dr Assunta Ruocco’s practice explores collaboration, technologies and spaces of production in the emergence of artworks. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and digital media, she develops durational projects shaped by human and non-human collaborators. Recent presentations include Mirrors, Windows, Portals, co-curated with Dr Alison Lloyd for Ffoto Cymru Festival, 2026; Our Days of Gold, TG Gallery, Nottingham, 2024. Publications on social media include “A Performative Approach to Mourning and the Reanimation of a Photographic Archive on Social Media” (Routledge, 2026), “Re-imagining @ourdaysofgold_film” in Ruukku (2025), and “Our Days of Gold: Love, Death, Instagram, and the Photographic Archive” in PARSE Journal (2024). “#insertingherselfinarthistory: Alison Lloyd’s Feminist Auto-Citation and Social Media” in Intersectional Selves, MAI (2025). https://assuntaruocco.co.uk/

JENNIFER GOOD

Dr Jennifer Good is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the history and theory of photojournalism and documentary photography at London College of Communication. In addition to her teaching across BA and MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at LCC, and the supervision of postgraduate research students, she is Research Coordinator for the LCC School of Media. She is a member of the International Association of Visual Culture (IAVC). She was formerly a faculty member at the Foundation for International Education and a researcher at the UK Government Art Collection. She was 2024 Visiting Researcher at Archivo Photography & Visual Culture Research Platform. In 2024 she was also the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Education Award. She was awarded the 2025 Eidolon Grant for research in vernacular photography, for her forthcoming project on family history and aerial photography. She is the author of Photography and September 11th: Spectacle, Memory, Trauma (Bloomsbury, 2015) co-author of Understanding Photojournalism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Mythologizing the Vietnam War: Visual Culture and Mediated Memory (CSP, 2014). She is a member of the editorial board for Archivo Papers journal, writes regularly for photography publications and speaks internationally about her research at scholarly events and in the media, including recent interviews for BBC Radio 4, the The Economist and the British Journal of Photography.

Image credit: Assunta Ruocco, Screenshot of @ourdaysofgold_film, Instagram, 22 May 2022