He Helped Shape Early Instagram—Now He’s Building Community in Maine: The Story of Josh Johnson
- Brick + Tides
- Apr 8
- 8 min read
It begins, as it probably should, with a phone call from the two Instagram founders who were still figuring out what they had built.
Josh Johnson had been posting every day—quietly, methodically—on an app that had barely introduced itself to the world. Three days after it launched, he downloaded it because someone on a podcast said it made photos look better. There were no hashtags yet, no search, no algorithims, no expectation that it would become anything more than a curiosity. And yet, within a few months, his account had become something like a compass for the platform, a place where people learned how to see.
“Kevin and Mike would email me… about how I thought it should be,” he said, remembering the early exchanges. “And they said, okay, Josh, we’re launching it on this date. Can you make a post to help explain it?”
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At one point, he was fielding direct messages from users who assumed he worked there, which he did not, answering questions about features that didn’t exist yet, shaping how people understood the app simply by showing up again the next day with another lesson, another prompt, another reason to participate. By then, he was gaining a thousand followers a day, sitting inside what felt like the center of something forming in real time, though no one had language for it yet.
“There was this energy around this app early on that was really cool,” he said. “It was easy to connect with people that had similar interests as you.”
He did not call it influence. He did not call it strategy. What the community he built was closer to a routine—something people could return to each day and find themselves inside of.
Before That, There Was a Different Life
Long before Instagram, before Hawaii, before the camper van, Josh was a marketing student trying to make a practical decision about his future, choosing stability over instinct in a way that felt reasonable at the time.
“I went for the guaranteed money,” he said. “They were saying… you’ll be making 100 grand and have 50 employees.”
The work placed him in nursing home administration in Florida and then Tennessee, where the responsibilities multiplied quickly, where the pace required a kind of constant attention that never quite let up. It was, by most definitions, a successful path. It also introduced him to something he had not experienced before - unhappiness.
In his mid-20's, the decision to leave did not come with a safety net or a clean alternative. It came with a van, a credit card, and a loose idea that photography might be worth chasing, even if it had never proven itself to be reliable.
He sold his car. Bought a camper. Filled it with cameras.
“And hit the road.”
Learning to See
The business idea failed almost immediately. No clients signed up for the adventure packages he had imagined, no steady income appeared to justify the risk, and yet the trip itself gave him something more durable than a plan.
“Moab… the Grand Canyon… Zion… that’s kind of what opened up my mind,” he said, describing the way those landscapes rearranged his sense of what was worth paying attention to.
There is a difference between deciding to be a photographer and becoming one, and for Josh, that difference was shaped somewhere between miles of open road and the realization that seeing is a skill that develops long before anyone pays you for it.
Hawaii and the First Real Break
The work arrived without warning.
A call from a wedding photographer in Hawaii. A same-day request. No time to prepare.
“I said, sure.”
He had not spent much time photographing people, and he understood that even then, but he showed up, worked through it, and returned with images that were good enough to keep him in rotation. Within a year, he was shooting multiple weddings each week, traveling between islands, finding a rhythm that did not require him to manage a business so much as step into a role when asked.
It was there, during those 7 years in Hawaii, that his daughter Miranda was born—a moment that would quietly reorder his priorities in a way that no career decision ever had.
“One thing I’ve been blessed with… whatever choices I needed to make… it was pretty easy to know… if I was putting her as top priority… I was doing the right thing.”
When the marriage ended, he moved to Georgia to remain close to her, choosing proximity over preference, building his life around a commitment that did not require explanation.
The Platform That Didn’t Exist Yet
By the time he downloaded Instagram in 2010, Josh had already spent years learning how to work within a community of photographers, sharing ideas, attending workshops, and slowly understanding that growth often comes through exchange rather than isolation.
What he recognized in those early days of the app was not its scale, but its potential for connection.
“I can recognize that I’m at the beginning of something that has a lot of energy behind it,” he said.
So he began posting daily lessons—small, practical pieces of advice that helped people make better images with the cameras they already had. The tips turned into prompts. The prompts turned into participation.
“Today is leading lines… think about railroad tracks receding into the distance.” And then, inevitably, it became something larger than one person.
By 2013, thousands of images were being submitted each day from around the world, all tied to a shared structure that he had built out of consistency and attention rather than design.
“10,000, 15,000 submissions every day.”
Brands noticed, too, and soon car companies, tourism boards, and global brands were hiring Josh to travel—across the country and overseas—to organize meetups where photographers gathered, walked, and created together under a shared set of hashtags.
The system worked because it asked people to engage with each other, not just with him.
“One photo… comment on two others… like three more.”
It created a loop that sustained itself, a kind of informal agreement that if you showed up, others would meet you there.
When It Shifted
The change did not arrive dramatically. It came through adjustments—small decisions at the platform level that changed how people saw each other’s work, how images were surfaced, and how participation felt.
“These companies… their job is to make as much money as they can,” Josh said, not with resentment, but with clarity.
A change to how hashtags functioned disrupted the visibility that had helped fuel the system, and with it, some of the immediacy that had made the community feel so alive.
“One little switch kind of messed up the vibe of the whole thing. And there have been lots of other little changes since along the same lines”
But Johnson is careful not to place all of the blame outside himself. The structured ritual he built was meant to be stronger than the algorithm, and in many ways it was—the community continued, and volunteers kept it alive.
What changed, he says, was also his own relationship to it.
“It’s taken quite a bit of soul searching and blunt honesty with myself to come to terms with why my passion waned”
Burnout and the challenges my adhd brain has running a business were part of the problem, but the more uncomfortable part is definitely related to ego. And that’s hard for me to admit. I am the guy who’s preaching connection is important not numbers.
In hindsight, he has realized how much momentum and visible expansion had been feeding his own motivation. Growth slowed and the platform’s energy shifted. When that changed, so did his energy available to invest and his sense of connection to the project.
What followed was not a clean break so much as a quiet retreat: a loss of passion complicated by shame, and by the uneasy feeling of no longer being excited by something that had once defined him. Maybe most difficult, the feeling of letting down the people he had once motivated and convinced to follow him into an experiment of global community.
“I’m still working through those feelings today to be honest”
What Remains
Years later, the 533,000 @JJCOMMUNITY account still exists. Volunteers—some of whom have been there for over a decade—continue to post, curate, and contribute, maintaining something that no longer depends on him in the way it once did.
“It’s all just happening because of volunteers… from all around the world.”
There is something revealing in that persistence, in the fact that the structure held even after the momentum changed, that people continued to return not because they were told to, but because they wanted to.
Maine
Josh arrived in Maine and is photographing local weddings again. www.JOSHJOHNSONPHOTO.com He is also telling small business stories through video work with feeling. (https://youtu.be/xjvD3JHKBu4) His parents and brother are in Maine and his daughter graduated high school and now attends the University of Georgia.
“I moved up… no regrets,” he said. “I really enjoy the coastline, the scenery, the people.”
The studio where we sat once belonged to a textile company, part of the older rhythm of Biddeford, where work was tied to place and repetition, where things were made over time. Outside, snow settled quietly across the street, softening the edges of the day.
When he's not creating photos and videos, he spends time in places like Clifford Park, where the paths curve through terrain that feels almost staged in its variation, and along the Audubon sanctuary near Biddeford Pool, where the water and land meet in a way that resists interruption. He has hiked portions of the Appalachian Trail. He talks about Portland’s Arts District not as a destination, but as a place where things are always happening just out of view—music in basements, conversations that spill into the street, the kind of activity that doesn’t need to announce itself to be real. Recently, he even took improv comedy classes.
“There’s a community here,” he said.
Returning to the Beginning
If you go back to the Instagram account now—the one that started under his name and became something larger—you will still find it moving forward, one prompt at a time, shaped by people he no longer needs to direct.
Over five hundred thousand people still follow @JJCOMMUNITY. Images still arrive from everywhere. Someone in Brazil selects a theme. Someone else posts a photograph that might be seen by thousands of people they will never meet.
The structure remains.
His idea for a community and helping others is intact.
And in a way, it circles back to the beginning—to a man sitting at the edge of something new, posting one image, one thought, one invitation at a time, not knowing exactly what it would become, only that it was worth returning to the next day.
“There was this really strong energy,” he said.
He didn’t try to capture it.
He built a place where it could stay.
Many thanks to Josh Johnson for his time on a snowy Tuesday, April 7th, 2026 in Biddeford, Maine. Interview and photos by Cy Cyr / Brick+Tides
Visit Josh online at www.JOSHJOHNSONPHOTO.com
Visit Josh on Instagram (@joshjohnson)
Visit Josh's @JJCOMMUNITY
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