Q & A with our Founders

Chatting with pr0ject uno founders Carol, @carolgong & Kristina, @shadow.boxer

Q: How did you two meet?

A: Well, we "virtually met" a few years ago, when we both worked on a small page moderatoring together and quickly became friends, due to our similar interest and taste in pictures, we became fast friends! We decided to one day start a page that would showcase our similar like for portraits and people, since at that time, instagram wasn't featuring many pictures of that genre.

When we decided to bring people and portraits to the forefront, we were approached by Pat, @sound_design. He is the founder of the amazing @royalsnappingartists community. He knew that making our portraits page a sub-group of RSA would be a great success! When @rsa_portraits starting becoming well-known in the community, we discussed with Pat to create a spin on it, by making a page for full-bodies shots with a mysterious & edgy flair, then @themysterypr0ject (formerly @rsa_mystery) was born.

Soon after that, we decided to bring our idea to @jjcommunity's anarchyfiles. We knew it would be welcomed, as JJ is known for all types of genres. So we created @jj_humanedge & @jj_allportraits, which was a similar style just on a different platform and a wider audience. After that, we widened our horizons with a larger genre for landscapes, urbex, cityscapes with @jj_sombre & @jj__mextures and joined pat with helping run the successful graphic arts pages @rsa_graphics.

As time went by...and our fanbase was becoming widespread, we made the extremely hard decision to retire our pages with RSA & JJ and create a community of our own, under one unified “project”, by changing the names of the former pages to correlate us as one unit. That place was @pr0ject_uno!

Fast forward 6 years of hard work, since the beginning of our meeting each other on social media, spread out over 22 genre based pages, we are still going strong! We owe a lot to our team of moderators & admins who have been with us along this journey! We have all become so close, it truly is a FAMILY here!

Q: What kinds of things go into starting a page? Most igers might not know?

A: When we started, we had basic knowledge. We knew the genre that we wanted to showcase & the idea to bring to the people. We created unique logos that spoke about the page, simply. We made script/templates to use as our feature captions. We also looked for moderators that were loyal in the community & had similar taste in their gallery style. Moderators that we think would speak for the page, as well as being excited about bringing great Art to a wider audience. Instagram has grown so much since we started, it is constantly changing, so we have to adapt to changing as well!

Q: What do you think the pages bring to Instagram & to photographers in general?

A: Well, when we created the pages, we realized that there wasn't really this type of self-expressive genre out there in the forefront. We wanted a place where people and photographers can embrace the power of the human body. Specifically, self love and expression. The drama that is created by a certain crop and/or lighting can evoke great emotion & mood. That is what we wanted to achieve by creating these pages. A community that people can express themselves in other ways & embrace them love for oneself & photography in general.

Q: How have you expanded after all these years?

We have not only kept our pages going strong & keeping true to our original visions on what we want our pages to highlight, but we have branched out to reach artists outside of Instagram.

Project Uno can be found on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube. We have also started a collaborative effort with the new photo-sharing iOS app, DAYFLASH, which has been amazing the far!

We have also try to engage our friends & family outside of the virtual world by hosting photo meets around the globe! TheFashionPr0ject hosted a Masterclass Workshop in Rome Italy, Pr0ject Uno & ThePortraitPr0ject have hosted meets in Central Park, San Diego, Toronto! We plan on doing more this year!

We have also expanded by branching out into the music scene. We have proudly worked with musical artists Maroon5 & Andy Grammer to launch their latest albums & collaborate on contests via instagram & our website! Pr0ject Uno also started TheMusicPr0ject featuring the best musical pictures, Dj’s, music videos & our very own weekly Curator series on SoundCloud!

Q: What do you want people to think of when they learn about Pr0ject Uno?

What we want people to know about us, is that we are people, just like everyone out there in the social media world. all of us involved in this project do it out of love. We have created a place where people can feel good about themselves & push them to go beyond they comfort zone! We hear from so many people thanking us for giving them a chance to express themselves to a wider audience! Everyone wants to feel like they are doing something special & unique, and we try to make everyone feel like what they are doing is important in this world!

We like to think that we are not just a bunch of feature pages, we are a community & a family! :)

#daylash #community #photosharing #ports #photoshop #pr0jectuno #andygrammer #somber #appstore #nature #mextures #portrait #art #instagram #iphone