While Instagram tends to emphasize the medium’s social utility, carriage trade’s Social Photography exhibitions have tracked an alternate course, inviting participants and viewers to encounter these images in a format free of peer-generated tallies, while offering the option of a sustained look afforded by a gallery setting. Social Photography contributors are not limited to visual artists, and include writers, curators, musicians, students, etc., reflecting the accessibly and ubiquity of cell phone camera use.

Some of this years’ participants are: Peggy Ahwesh, Dennis Adams, Diana Al-Hadid, Liz Deschenes,Tracy Emin, Barbara Ess, Hal Foster, Ceal Floyer, Dan Graham, Beatrice Gross, Emily Hunt, Sarah Meister, Thurston Moore, Neil Jenney, Louise Lawler, Lee Ranaldo, Asad Raza, Walter Robinson, John Schabel, Molly Soda, Barry Schwabsky, Carol Szymanski, among many others.

Functioning as a benefit exhibition to help support upcoming programming at carriage trade, there is no particular theme guiding Social Photography VI apart from how the cell phone camera is most often used. Participants email images from their phones to carriage trade, which are then formatted, printed on 7″ x 5″ paper, and sold online and in the gallery during the exhibition.

Less a sanctioning of an evolving medium than a hybrid of a traditional exhibition format and the wider net of social media, Social Photography also functions as a means to sustain and expand carriage trade’s community, which exists in the combined spheres of online experience and the irreplaceable physicality of the exhibition space itself.