Eye Of Wisdom

Veteran creative director and photographer David Lipman has adapted to the Instagram era like few others

- Keith Gordon

At a time when Instagram and photos taken on an iPhone are playing an outsize role in the advertising and photography industries, there might be no one more qualified to discuss the monumental shifts taking place than creative director and photographer David Lipman. The native New Yorker, despite having already built a traditional advertising powerhouse, the Lipman agency, has remade himself and his agency to thrive in the new age of digital advertising and social media.

“When the digital age hit, I started posting only pictures of my family and my dog and stuff like that,” explains Lipman. “Then my daughter gave me a lecture one night that I had to start Instagramming my work. Now Instagram has become my number one tool of communication out in the world. I mix my old work with the new, and the work of other photographers with work I shot on my own. It became my sort of ‘thing.’ ”

Following decades of work in conventional ad campaigns, Lipman finds himself thriving in a world lacking the old-school gatekeepers and agency power structures. “The democratization occurring is both positive and negative,” he muses. “Anybody can pass for a photographer today. We look at these images two inches tall, and they’re very forgiving, so the art of the photograph is not the same. If you open a magazine, it becomes a contract, and a magazine like Vogue could sit on people’s desks for years. But in the world of Instagram, you see it and you move on. It’s really quick…it’s not contractual in any way.”