Would you delete all your Instagram photos? Three years ago, the photographer and professor Richard Koci Hernandez took the unusual move of deleting all of his photos from his Instagram account. His goal was to start from scratch, from a clean slate. "I've always felt that my photographs shouldn't live forever," he said back in 2014. "But it seems to me that the Internet is increasingly allowing things to live forever." I've been thinking about Hernandez's words this week, as I woke up one morning to discover that my Instagram account had been hacked and 200 of my photos were gone. Thankfully, I was able to regain control of the account. But as Instagram worked to recover my deleted images, I went back to what Hernandez had said. I realized I had two options: Hope Instagram would be able to fix my account and recover all my photos, or start from scratch too, deleting the images that remained. Hernandez and I talked this week about this. "Who doesn't like a good do-over, a clean slate, a fresh start?" he told me. "There is a freedom to letting go. Social media can have such a stranglehold on how you or I create, and for me [that] can often mess with my flow. It can also take a lot of the 'doing it for the love of it' out of the equation." While I take photographs and write about photography, I don't consider myself a photographer – far from it – but Hernandez's words resonated. And I am sure that I am not alone. In many of the conversations I've had with people with large social media followings, they expressed feeling dominated by a sense of dread and heavy responsibility to their followers. A photographer once called it "feeding the beast," and he's not that far from the truth. And as I perused the photos that remained in my account, I realized what I was missing most wasn't the images themselves. Instead, I felt a sense of loss for the social interactions that these photographs elicited; the messages from family and friends that brought this extra social context that doesn't exist on your phone's camera roll or in a photo album. "Wiping the deck clean was a wonderful way for me to clear the cobwebs of old work and focus on the work," said Hernandez. Maybe, for such a purge to be successful, we must rethink our reliance on social media as the main conduits for conversations about our photography. (Maybe VSCO, at times considered a good alternative to Instagram, had it right all along as it refused to add features such as "likes" and "comments" to its social app.) In the end, Instagram was able to recover my missing images, but I'm not done thinking about what Hernandez said. – Olivier Laurent | 
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