More than 150 amateur photographers met in front of Tapan Theatre on Sadananda Road in Kalighat on Sunday afternoon.
They split into six teams and for the next four hours, toured a 2km stretch, capturing many moods of Kalighat in their cameras. The theme was “Colours of Calcutta”.
They explored Sadananda Road, Nepal Bhattacharjee Street, Iswar Ganguly Street, Tinkari Ghosh Lane and Mukherjee Para Lane. Their subjects were varied. They clicked just-married couples. They clicked old houses with majestic façades and lattices. They clicked a man idling on the threshold of a house, a dog seated beside him.
The “photowalk” was organised by Kolkata Instagrammers, an online community that counts more than 170K members. The group started eight years ago and had 75K members in 2020.
The ever tightening grip of social media over young people, more specifically, the rise in the popularity of Instagram, has played a key role in increasing the size of these online communities, their founders said.
“The easy, visual, voyeuristic format of Instagram is the perfect medium for young amateur photographers. The whole world is their audience. Their location and background don’t matter. That is why the communities are all growing in size,” said Sammya Brata Mullick, the 36-year-old founder of Calcutta Instagrammers.
Sunday’s photowalk was the 75th for the Calcutta Instagrammers. Shyambazar, Kumartuli, the Maidan, the serene ghats of the Hooghly, Park Street, the previous walks covered different areas of the city.
On Sunday, the participants came from places as far Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha, said Mullick.
Many also came from Siliguri, Malda, East Burdwan, Nadia and Hooghly.
Soumya Kanti Bhattacharya, 31, had come from Madanpur, a village near Kalyani in Nadia.
His father runs a driver training centre. Bhattacharya handles the operations there. His interest in photography was stoked by “a friend’s touchscreen phone” in college.
Now, he uses a DSLR camera that costs over Rs 1.5 lakh.
“I love taking pictures in north Kolkata. Kalighat is a neighbourhood that is like north Kolkata in many ways,” said Bhattacharya, who has over 5K followers on Instagram.
The advent of reels has changed the game, by creating the opportunities to monetise content, said social media influencers like Mullick.
“Reels are being promoted so much by Instagram. There is a possibility that with even 1,000 followers, you can still get 1 million views. When a brand spots an opportunity to garner so many views, it will want to collaborate with such influencers to promote their brands,” he said.
The Calcutta Instagrammers community has had successful partnerships with brands such as Uber, JBL and Khadim, he said.
Ankita Chakraborty, the founder of Calcutta Cacophony, one of the oldest Instagram communities in Kolkata, echoed Mullick. She pointed out how young people no longer exchanged phone numbers but Instagram IDs.
“When we started a decade ago, we wanted to explore what is happening in the city. Now, we do curated experiential campaigns around the city. Instagram has definitely made us more relevant and topical to the young audience,” said the 27-year-old.
Reports have claimed that the average age of an Indian Instagram user is around 25 years.