They aren’t trying to sell us anything when they get dressed for Pilates or work, but their personal style has had just as much, if not more influence than that of actual influencers for its organic strangeness.

This decade also produced the enigmatic anti-Instagram star: Shia LaBeouf, Kristen Stewart, the Olsen sisters. Even Taylor Swift walking backward down a hill to avoid paparazzi is arguably more revealing than a personal Instagram. Sometimes, if all of the elements are right, they can feel stunning in their humanity - like works of art. Where does this leave us? In a twisted way, the paparazzi image now reads as somehow more real than the ones we see on Instagram. Regular people became the subject of their own, self-generated tabloid photos over the last ten years, while celebrities aimed to seem more “regular.” At the same time, as Amanda Hess points out in an essay for the New York Times, “ When Instagram Killed the Tabloid Star,” social media scrambled our understanding of who was on display. They took what we loved most about paparazzi photos - the too-much information, the shock value, the mundanity - and made it their business.

The Kardashians, of course, are masters of this. Images of celebrities living their daily lives once felt scarce, but now they’re generated every minute of every day by the subjects themselves and carefully staged to their liking.

After Instagram was born in 2010, the celebrity paparazzi photo lost much of its power.

Paparazzi pictures