Not really. Some artists put their accounts on private to protect their images, but I think this limits your exposure to new and broader audiences. I think it’s really hard to prevent people stealing your intellectual property given the scale of Instagram. The majority of the time, people are not intentionally trying to disregard you as an artist or photographer by not tagging you — photos and credits get lost in the chain cycle of reposting, sometimes they are pulled from an uncredited post on Tumblr or Twitter. I think it’s just a matter of being aware that once your photos are posted online, there’s a possibility they will be shared without your name attached. It’s just the nature of the internet.
It would also be extremely hypocritical of me to go after someone for stealing my ideas because my work is entirely based around bootlegging designers. However, I’ve had a couple of strange experiences where people claimed I took their ideas or concepts on Instagram. For example, I posted a pair of jeans I made which featured a rip off Nike logo. Shortly after a small-scale street-wear brand commented claiming they did it first even though I had never encountered or heard of their line before. Nike is the most prolific athletic brand in the world and there have probably been thousands of riffs on the brand logo — no one can claim someone is “copying” them when they are in fact technically ripping of another brand. I regularly see other people online who bootleg and repurpose designer goods, but the idea of them “copying” me would never even cross my mind. Creatives are a community of people who, while respecting other people’s visions, remix and rework old and new ideas all the time. There’s a constant build and development of artistic content on and off the internet, and without re-imagining the concepts of creatives, we can never progress and evolve as a society.
