Materializing Magic: How the Witches of Instagram Make the Invisible Visible Through Digital Photography and Editing Techniques

Abstract

Recently, contemporary witchcraft has become increasingly subject to commodification, with many practitioners criticized for their pursuit of the “witch aesthetic” on social media. With Instagram feeds featuring carefully staged photographs of tools, materials, and spaces related to the craft, these “Insta-witches” or “#witchesofinstagram” often use photo editing applications like Photoshop to digitally manipulate these images in order to enhance their magical or otherworldly dimensions. In this article, I argue that the excessive use of magical “stuff,” along with the staging and editing of images shared on social media does not have to be superficial or devoid of meaning. Rather, I explore how these Witches of Instagram participate in what anthropologist Jennifer Deger refers to as “thick photography”—a process of image creation and alteration that gives rise to multilayered stories capable of extending beyond the bounds of the ordinary. In this context, photography foregrounds the intuitive, imaginative, and embodied ways of knowing central to the practice of magic, making visible that which may otherwise remain invisible. These digital images thus become relationally constituted material surfaces where networks of bodies, objects and energies are visualized, revealing the porous boundaries between categories such as human and nonhuman, internal and external, material and immaterial, and mundane and magical.