This article considers a group of residents from South Bend, Indiana who sought to visually rebrand their city using Instagram. It asks how a group that sees itself as prizing authenticity, ultimately settled on a single, coherent style. The resident artists as a group of primarily young, white professionals in creative fields, sought to capture the authentic South Bend; that is, the city as they experience it as residents. By tracing the development of this community of resident artists and the strategies they pursued to shift perceptions of the city for the better, this study argues that the dynamics of grassroots, resident-initiated branding lead to homogeneity, even among those attentive to the representation of diverse perspectives in their content. To advance their own account of the city, these resident artists cultivated a community of like-minded individuals through recruitment and a process of socialization into their approach to civic boosterism using photography meetups and collaborative content creation. Their meetups and their attention to the photos’ reception by those on the platform for their efforts—Instagram—ultimately facilitated the group’s convergence on a single style.

本文考虑了来自印第安纳州南本德的一群居民，他们试图使用 Instagram 对他们的城市进行视觉重塑。它询问一个将自己视为珍视真实性的团体如何最终确定一种单一的、连贯的风格。常驻艺术家是一群主要是创意领域的年轻白人专业人士，他们试图捕捉真正的南本德；也就是说，他们作为居民所体验的城市。通过追踪这个常驻艺术家社区的发展以及他们为更好地转变对城市的看法所采取的策略，本研究认为，草根的动态、驻地发起的品牌塑造导致同质性，即使在那些关注代表的人中也是如此。其内容的不同观点。为了推进自己对这座城市的了解，这些常驻艺术家通过招聘和社会化过程培养了一个志同道合的人社区，他们使用摄影聚会和协作内容创作来促进公民。他们的聚会以及他们对照片在他们的努力平台上的接受度的关注——Instagram——最终促进了该团体在单一风格上的融合。