By Rachel Yeager
Max Hill is a local artist in Missoula who designs, videos, and photographs. You can find him at many events, especially outdoor activities, he covers it all.
University of Montana student Rachel Yeager recently interviewed Hill about social media and what follows is a transcript of their conversation, edited lightly for clarity or brevity.
Q: As a local photographer, how do you gain exposure beyond just Missoula?
A: Any exposure I get beyond Missoula is incidental through social media, word of mouth, and I guess anyone that happens upon my website. I have taken gigs outside of Missoula, but I have only ever been approached seriously by people who knew me from here in the first place.
Q:What has been your biggest struggle using social media to promote your photography?
A: I started on Instagram in November of 2013 as a place to share photography which I had started as a somewhat serious hobby in the summer of 2012 but Instagram was a very different animal back then. Since Meta turned it into their test bed for chasing the features of every trending competitor, the usage keeps moving farther away from just photo sharing.
Q: What inspired you to become a photographer? Have you always known this is what you wanted to do? Was it something you discovered more recently?
A: I have been an artist of one kind or another since I was a kid. However, I didn’t get started in photography until after my second year at UM, (I double majored in Media Arts and Music). It was the result of a convergence of events that included but are not limited to, taking a year off school for financial reason, a break up, and brining my relatively new camera to the first day of marching band camp when I came back to school. It got cemented as a hobby, and I have pretty much never left home without a RAW file capable camera since.
Q: How do you use your social media to advertise your business?
A: Pretty passively, I started social media just as an outlet to share my work with anyone that was interested. Now I have a number of regular recurring gigs with returning clients and the ocasional specialty jobs. I happily share that work as a hook to catch people’s attention, but the rest of it is just me walking around with my camera. So I haven’t really changed my sharing habits much in the past +10 years. I’m glad to take advantage of better resolution images, sharing more image as at once, faster smartphones, and even a little video at times but my work still boils down to, find something of interest, take what I think are the best photos I can, share them and hope people think they look nice.
Q: Do you enjoy the social media aspect of your job or does it feel more like a chore?
A: I enjoy it as the primary source of feedback I get for my work. Having an audience of more than friends and family would have required publication and or gallery shows just 20 years ago. I value a platform that I can put my work on and anyone from Missoula to Paris to Tokyo can maybe see and enjoy it. Instagram in particular is good because it is photo based (if only sort of at this point) but non photographers use it all the time.
All that being said, the platforms themselves have been getting worse and worse. I get that social media needs to make money as a business but the ‘Enshittification’ of all these platforms seems irreversible at this point. When I started on Instagram, your main feed was exclusively a chronological display of only things from people you specifically followed. At the risk of sounding like an old man lamenting “back in my day” this was inherently a better experience for the public users. However it wasn’t nearly as good for active targeted advertising and interest information gathering for the big business element of the platform. So, now we have the algorithm driven feed, full of adds and suggestions of random things you aren’t actually following of your own volition. Tack on the recent development of all these platforms scraping anything you put on them for AI training weather you like it or not, and any pleasure I get out of sharing my work comes with a very large looming asterisk at this point.
Q: How do you stay creative and motivated with your work?
A: I don’t always. This is why I like having certain amount of paying work that I have to fulfill as a commitment. It means you have to go out and work through it any time your motivation lags. I also have a lot of outlets, so sometimes it’s just time to get out my pencil and paper for a week or two instead.
Q: What social media accounts do you use to post photography?
A: At this point, my only active social media account is Instagram. I was never on Twitter, and I’m on Facebook only because it’s a requirement to have a creator account on Instagram. I’ve tried a few of the smaller platforms over the years but none of them have really worked for me and good video content in a bigger time commitment to produce constantly so YouTube and TikTok are out.
Q: Is there anywhere else you upload photography for the public to see? What is your best method of advertising?
A: I have a personal website but it only gets updated once in a blue moon. As I said on Instagram, calling my photography a business is a bit of stretch, so calling anything I do advertising is probably a stretch too. My goal is to have an outlet for my work, but the fact that I get gigs for time to time as a result is a nice perk. While I would love to make photography my day job, the types of photography one usually do as a solo business doesn’t appeal, (I don’t mind working weddings or headshot from time to time but usually only for people I know) so for the moment I just try and make enough to repair and upgrade my gear as needed.
This Q&A is part of a series created by students in Courtney Cowgill’s Social Media and Audience Engagement course at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Students sought out creatives who are doing social media for good to offer tips and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of social media.
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