How many times a day do you take a photograph; one, five or maybe even ten? And what are they of? Scrolling through your Instagram and Facebook feeds, you’d be hard pushed to find someone who isn’t eating/travelling/enjoying a sunset cocktail every single day.

These photos have become our social currency. They allow us the space to offer up our reality in a particular light, to curate a life that perhaps isn’t quite as accurate as our messy, sometimes chaotic but often dull daily existence.

The nature of photography and imagery today is being explored in a new exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery in Soho, London entitled All I Know is What’s On The Internet. The exhibition is showcasing the work of 11 contemporary artists, each of whom questions, records and brings to life cultural dynamics around imagery.

The exhibition sets out to look at how the purpose of photography has changed. Where it once acted like a particular kind of documentary, enabling us to better understand our world, today it is more focused on what happens around the image, about how many people saw our photo and consequently liked it.

As the gallery has said of the exhibition, “[it] presents a radical exploration of photography when the boundaries between truth and fiction, machine and human are being increasingly called into question”.

So, next time you go to capture that stack of pancakes or your reflection in a particularly shiny mirror, as you thumb goes to open your chosen social media app, think carefully about the consumption of that image. Because the filters you choose, the likes you receive and ultimately the feed that photo ends up on all say something about the wider cultural implications of photography within society.

All I Know is What’s On The Internet is at the Photographer’s Gallery from 26th October 2018 until 24th February 2019. Visit the gallery’s website to buy tickets and find out more.