Authenticity in tension with homogeneity in grassroots place branding

Abstract

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.