The 5 best Instagram profiles with totally random photos

A few days ago, we published an article about how the social media audience had grown tired of the "perfect" and hypercurated Instagram feeds of influencers, favoring instead a more honest approach to social media aesthetics that is now starting to move in an extremely anti-artificial direction. The result is blurry, sometimes candid and random photos with misplaced details or spontaneous or anti-aesthetic poses. When, over time, moodboard pages like @hidden.ny and @jjjound ceased to be moodboards and became brands in their own right - their legacy was picked up by Photodump pages, which amass shots that, taken individually, may seem completely random but instead, all together, become a reflection of the minds of their curators.

1. Jesse Whiting (@whiting.jesse)

A kind of underground cult destination of the Instagram world, @whiting.jesse is a mysterious Photodump page that posts daily a carousel of absurd, surreal, disturbing, apocalyptic, kitschy and even vaguely erotic shots. The aesthetics of the page are so camp and unbalanced: from photos of kittens to shots that seem to date back to the pre-Internet era, through memes, apocalyptic scenarios, objects of terrible taste, movie quotes and you name it. The best thing is that after following it for a while, after an initial period of puzzlement, all this craziness will start to make sense.

2. Daniel Arnold (@arnold_daniel)

Daniel Arnold doesn't do actual photodumps - rather, he's a celebrated photographer who has shot for Vogue and The New York Times. But his career really began on Instagram in 2012, exploding after a Gawker article about him that brought the quirky, candid and sometimes bizarre quality of his photos in front of the public eye. New York is usually the backdrop for these shots, although celebrities like Zendaya and Kim Kardashian pop in and here and there - portrayed with a raw, anti-ideal style that is then the key to their appeal. The best thing about Daniel Arnold's photos is that, in their stark, unfiltered spontaneity, they give the feeling of witnessing a real-life moment in real time.

3.  Nicolas Heller (@newyorknico)

Another creative New Yorker, who in life deals with producing and directing films and video clips, Nicolas Heller found a cult following during the lockdown, when his social media challenges allowed him to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. The subjects of his shots are the moments of ordinary madness that animate the streets of New York: whether it's rats, frying doughnuts, weird old men, dogs with strange expressions or shopkeepers on their lunch break, Heller is there to capture every moment with a photo.

4.  Thrift Store Art (@thriftstoreart)

Do you know the bizarre objects you usually come across at flea markets? Bizarre cookbooks, VHS with unlikely covers, figurines of Disney characters, vinyls, paintings of clowns and photos of Steven Seagal, children's clothes and so on and so forth. This account collects all that: a store of horrors (try to imagine those objects in your home) that is impossible to stop exploring.

5.  Indie Sleaze (@indiesleaze)

This page (which we mentioned in one of our previous articles) turns the classic photodump into a monument to an entire era: the early 2000s. These are photos of parties, old advertising campaigns, shots of celebrities like The Teenagers and MGMT, concerts and movies that are a blast from the past to an era of wisps, glitter, sweat and hedonism. As well as an immense amount of cigarettes.