#insertingherselfinarthistory: Alison Lloyd’s Feminist Auto-Citation & Social Media

by: Assunta Ruocco , November 10, 2025

This article examines the work of the artist Alison Lloyd (1957-2024), as presented on her Instagram accounts, @alisonclloyd and @romilly_crescent_docs, focusing on her use of the platform to revive her archive of early photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. Lloyd’s remediation and uploading of her early practice into a contemporary digital self-narration constitute a novel approach, which I conceptualise as feminist auto-citation. This theoretical framework explores how women artists can re-insert their early works into digital spaces to reclaim visibility.

Lloyd’s Instagram accounts, active from 2014 to 2024, provided her with a platform for inserting her early analogue photographic work into the flows of digital images and contemporary art discourse while also ‘#editingarthistory’ as the artist herself suggested (see Fig. 6 below). Through technological remediation (Bolter & Grusin 1999), strategic reposting and annotation, and the creative use of hashtags, Lloyd reanimated her early images. By updating them with current reflections and embedding them in new conversations with a diverse and intergenerational audience, Lloyd created a complex, interactive digital palimpsest that unfolded as a performative durational artwork.

The intricate conceptual and aesthetic dimensions of Lloyd’s work online and ‘away from the keyboard’ (Russell 2020: 15) warrant extensive scholarly analysis and curatorial engagement. This article’s rigorous close analysis of over a decade of digital content focuses specifically on the originality of her approach to reactivating and disseminating early photographic works through social media. It situates Lloyd’s practice within broader debates in contemporary visual culture, feminist citational ethics, and new hybrid forms of art and writing. With my concept of auto-citation, I show how Lloyd’s strategies constitute a feminist intervention that challenges dominant art-historical narratives, reclaims authorship over the archival representation of women artists’ contributions, and foregrounds the digital sphere as a critical site for feminist artistic praxis.

I employ a multi-faceted research methodology to analyse Lloyd’s digital self-archiving and self-narration through Instagram. I engage with a combination of primary sources, such as Lloyd’s Instagram posts, her publications, exhibitions, and recorded conversations, as well as secondary literature in feminist art history, media studies, and digital humanities.

My study uses a qualitative analysis of Lloyd’s Instagram content, drawing on digital ethnographic methods (Pink et al. 2016), visual analysis, and comparative art history frameworks. By situating Lloyd’s work within broader feminist artistic traditions—ranging from 1970s women’s self-portraiture to contemporary practices—the study traces a network of feminist artistic strategies that emphasise self-documentation, appropriation, and intertextuality. This methodological approach allows for a reading of Lloyd’s auto-citation strategies as both an extension and an update to traditional feminist artistic methodologies.

I will lay the foundations for my concept of feminist auto-citation by exploring the interconnected methodological frameworks of Autotheory, Autofiction, and the notion of ‘Image Quotation’ in relation to Lloyd’s work. Recent scholarship on Autotheory provides a critical framework for contextualising Lloyd’s social media as a feminist intervention. The source code of social media writing, or ‘micro-blogging,’ has been traced back to literary modes such as the diary and journal, positioning it within a long-standing tradition of self-reflective, fragmented, and processual modes of discourse (Walker Rettberg 2014). However, Lloyd’s engagement with social media extends beyond self-documentation; it operates as an autotheoretical practice, intertwining personal experiences with critical theory in a mode that is explicitly feminist and politically charged. Autotheory, as defined by Fournier (2021) and others, is a conceptual and performative feminist practice that challenges patriarchal and institutionalised modes of theoretical discourse, foregrounding lived experience as a site of intellectual and artistic production (Bal 2015; Laubender 2020; Brostoff & Fournier 2022; Fournier 2018). Through the first-person voice and practices of ‘self-imaging,’ artists and writers engage in a critical wrestling with hegemonic discourses, extending feminist theory into aesthetic, ethical, and socio-political domains (Fournier 2018: 643). I will show how Lloyd’s self-imaging strategies align with this mode of feminist self-inscription, in which her analogue to digital remediation, Instagram captions, and intertextual references function as a form of live theorisation, a mode of autotheoretical feminist self-inscription that performs theory through self-imaging (Jones 2006: 134; Hickey-Moody et al. 2016: 225; Fournier 2018: 643–644). I will demonstrate in the following sections how, by deploying autotheoretical methodologies, Lloyd’s social media use not only recuperates her past work but also contributes to ongoing, live theoretical and political debates online.

Another conceptual framework I will use to analyse Lloyd’s social media work is that of autofiction. Autofiction defines a literary genre that combines autobiographical and fictional elements and has been increasingly used in recent years—not uncontroversially—instead of traditional forms such as memoir and autobiography (Effe & Lawlor 2022: 2) to conceptualise hybrid and experimental forms of ‘life writing.’ The term is now increasingly applied to a range of media, including social media. For example, in ‘Ghost Writing the Self’ Zach Pearl makes the argument that the performative construction of an author-character, a defining feature of autofiction, is also evident in the everyday interactions facilitated by digital and networked communication, particularly on social media platforms, where self-imaging is shaped by platform-specific design features and affordances (Pearl 2019: 161). Elaine Kasket extends this analysis to examine how digital platforms create ghostly afterlives that persist beyond the author’s lifespan (Kasket 2019). Erica Scourti’s The Outage project explored autofiction by outsourcing the construction of a narrative self to a ghostwriter, who interpreted her digital footprint and created art from the constructed nature of digital identity (Scourti 2017).

Autofiction has also been increasingly employed as a critical framework for examining photographic and photography-adjacent literary material, particularly in relation to the intersections of self-imaging, performance, and text. One notable example is Claude Cahun’s self-portraiture, particularly with regard to her experimental autobiographical writing (Grant 2022). Cahun’s photographic practice, composed of staged, androgynous self-portraits, operates in dialogue with her literary experiments, which incorporate elements of fiction, autobiography, and gender performativity. Her work exemplifies autofiction’s central tenets, as it resists stable identity categories and engages in a self-reflexive, often fragmented, narration of the self (Grant 2022: 289). Annie Ernaux’s literary engagement with photography has been the subject of critical attention in relation to her writing, which, despite her reservations, is seen as exemplary of the autofictional genre (Marcus 2022: 319). Ernaux, known for her blending of personal memory with sociopolitical history, often incorporates photographic references into her prose, using them as prompts for self-exploration and collective memory work, even when the images themselves are absent and only evoked through description (Ernaux 2008).

Image quotation, as conceptualised in this article, refers to the deliberate reproduction and direct reuse of visual materials, akin to textual quoting in academic and literary discourse. In contrast, image citation involves acknowledging the source of a visual element without necessarily replicating it, aligning with the function of textual citation. Within Lloyd’s practice, image quotation manifests through re-photographing, captioning, and annotating, actively engaging with both her own archival images and the work of other artists and cultural figures. In the broader context of social media, the concept of image quotation aligns with established norms of reposting etiquette, which emphasise proper attribution to the original creator. Platforms such as Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Pinterest facilitate the rapid dissemination of images, often without adequate credit (Troemel in Kholeif 2014: 39). The concept of ‘Image as Direct Quotation’ was theorised by Jaimie Baron in relation to cinema and the moving image in 2012. However, a similar theorisation has yet to be developed in relation to social media, despite the rise of reposting apps dedicated to the extraction of images and captions from existing Instagram posts, with the option of sharing with a watermark clearly pointing to the original author (Gerlitz et al. 2019) and the abundance of popular articles explaining how to use these tools correctly. Social media reposting, or ‘regramming,’ etiquette involves tagging and explicitly naming the original artist in captions, ensuring that quoted visual content is not misrepresented as an original creation (scrunch.com 2024). This acknowledgement helps address copyright concerns, preserves the integrity of the quoted image, and enables users to follow the link to view the image quoted within its original context. Just as academic quotation maintains the attribution of a text’s author, image quotation upholds the authenticity and provenance of visual works in digital social media culture.

Instagram and Alison Lloyd’s Photographic Archive

In the current historical moment, we see many re-examinations of archival material that centre women artists who were active in the 1970s and 80s, a time when their work was often overlooked. Women in Revolt, an exhibition that includes some of Lloyd’s Romilly Crescent polaroids (see Figs. 4-5), and the series Jake, are examples of this (Young 2023). Feminist methodologies of archival excavation employ various strategies to reanimate material, including the exhibition of archival materials, fictional reconstruction, and re-enactment (Grant 2011; Zapperi 2013; Damiani 2022). Lloyd’s use of social media is another such strategy, seeking not only to establish a historiographical record of her work but also to reanimate her past work and explore its currency in the present moment, engaging with both her peers and younger generations through using social media as a site for the durational performance of ‘auto-citation.’

I use the terms ‘archive’ and ‘archival’ as they were employed by Lloyd herself to refer to her ‘hoard’ of early work and printed matter on many occasions in her social media posts (@alisonclloyd 19 January 2018; 21 November 2018; 5 April 2019; 29 April 2020; 12 May 2020 and more). In my article ‘Our Days of Gold. Love, Death, Instagram and the Photographic Archive,’ I discuss the archival gesture in relation to both the moment of photographic capture and its presentation within a social media architecture such as Instagram (Ruocco 2024: 11), in reference to Okwui Enwezor’s definition of photography and film as preeminent forms of archival material (Enwezor 2008: 11-12). Lloyd’s archive presents itself as a cache of early work to be returned to repeatedly, as and when images become relevant to contemporary debates and connect to her current work and research, rather than as a closed system of ordered and categorised documents. Lloyd’s archival images are not fixed, but open to being remade and represented: they were ‘saved in shoe boxes for over 40 years to be worked ongoing’ [sic] (@romilly_crescent_docs 3 August 2022).

Fig 1. @alisonclloyd (13 April 2017) ‘Now one of my contributions to the year 1979/80. Printed for the first time in 2017 in colour in a dark room by Dan …’ [Instagram Screenshot]

As made explicit by Lloyd in the 2017 post I screenshot in Fig. 1, her early photographic negatives and slides were never displayed, and some were not even printed at the time they were created; they were subsequently stored for between 35 and 40 years. Digitised and shared on social media from 2013 onwards, these works were only printed and exhibited after their digital dissemination. ‘Because the camera is literally an archiving machine’ (Enwezor 2008: 12) Lloyd’s negatives and slides could be said to have become ‘archival objects’ as soon as they were captured, processed and immediately placed in storage in shoe boxes (Lloyd 2022).

Instagram’s grid-like structure—its emphasis on repetition, engagement, and visual sequencing—facilitated Lloyd’s iterative and durational approach to self-archiving. By strategically posting archival images alongside new textual interventions, she generated a layered, evolving narrative that resisted the fixity of institutional archives. This was not a strategy without risk: Lloyd would have had to contemplate and accept the loss of power over her work and imagery inherent in accepting Instagram’s terms and conditions, as the price to pay for accessing its platforms and networks (Instagram, n.d.). Erica Scourti’s ghostwritten novel The Outage (2017) also operates within the logic of voluntary exposure, where the artist pre-emptively ‘outs’ her digital footprint, mirroring how social media demands hypervisibility in exchange for the opportunity to vie for artistic recognition. However, Scourti’s concern about the limits of over-identification, and whether it ultimately reinforces the structures it seeks to critique, is also pertinent to Lloyd’s practice: to what extent does Lloyd’s reliance on Instagram as an archival tool make her work vulnerable to the same capitalist corporate forces she sought to circumvent?

Unlike museum collections or institutional archives, which are designed for permanence, social media is inherently ephemeral, subject to platform changes, deletions, and obsolescence. This overwriting can be user-driven, of course, and scholars such as Walker Rettberg (2014) and Fallon (2021) have examined how, within social media platforms, memory and self-narration are continually revised and reshaped. Recent corporate-driven changes to Instagram illustrate an increasingly threatening source of instability driven by its economic model and growing influence on consumer markets (Ji 2023; Register et al. 2023). In addition to concerns over Meta’s AI policies and content moderation rollbacks (Meta 2025), the platform’s sudden modification of its traditional grid layout in January 2025 further underscores the fragility of social media as an archival tool for art (Peters 2025). Designed to accommodate users migrating from TikTok, the new layout disrupted the long-established aesthetic coherence of the square grid, destabilising artists’ long-term digital legacies, including Lloyd’s. This shift aligns with Instagram’s broader prioritisation of 4:5 vertical images and video content, a transition that disadvantages static, photographic, and archival work (New York Post 2025). For artists like Lloyd, whose self-archiving practice relied on still image-based narration, these changes threaten both legibility and artistic integrity, further eroding artistic autonomy in corporate-controlled digital environments.

Over the past decade and a half, the advent of social media has reshaped the politics of artistic recognition, providing artists with new, more direct avenues for sharing their work with audiences (Pötzsch 2018; Petrides & Vila de Brito 2024; Bishop 2023). Yet, commercially driven changes have long threatened digital communities through algorithmic modifications that privilege engagement metrics over organic communities and archival coherence (Leaver et al. 2020: 19). Lloyd’s practice embodies this paradox—her images thrived by circulating within a networked, interactive space rather than a controlled institutional archive. Yet, after her death, her self-archiving project is more vulnerable than ever to loss, alteration, or decontextualisation, highlighting broader concerns about digital preservation and ownership in contemporary social media art historiography. Her work raises critical questions about what it means to digitally archive and rewrite artistic legacies on social media, particularly when those archives rely on privately owned, profit-driven infrastructures (Zinaman 2024).

Still, Instagram’s interactive nature facilitated Lloyd’s uniquely dynamic engagement with audiences and communities. Giannachi’s work on audience-led documentation as an integral part of the epistemology of contemporary art’s hybrid forms underscores the urgency of attending to the participatory dimensions of Lloyd’s digital archive, which itself constitutes a living, co-constructed artwork (Giannachi 2023). Unlike the fixed narratives of printed monographs or museum retrospectives, Lloyd’s work remained fluid, continuously reshaped by comments, shares, and algorithmic redistribution. Her interactions with artists, scholars, and activists through comments and reposts shaped the performative unfolding of her work, underscoring the fragile yet lively communal dimension of feminist auto-citation—a collective process of making her work visible.

Feminist Self-Uploading: Autotheory, Autofiction and Auto-Citation.

In this section, I will present examples of Lloyd’s consistent practice of sharing her archival photographs on social media, accompanied by captions that provided context and extended their possible readings, and thereby ‘making [new] artwork’ (@romilly_crescent_docs 16 November 2022). I will examine how this deliberate strategy aligns her work with autotheoretical and autofictional methodologies, serving as a form of art practice, artistic self-historicisation and a means of re-engaging past works within contemporary discourse. Building on this analysis, I will introduce and develop auto-citation as a framework for theorising Lloyd’s approach to social media.

Fig. 2 @alisonclloyd 17 June 2018. ‘Constellation Street or Claude Road, Cardiff 1976 35 mm colour slides. I am probably with Jake. I directed the shots. I may have used a timer. I could say now that she is ‘marking time’ or ‘making a place.’ Whatever I say it’s of now and all that I’ve learnt since about art and life. Overlaying what I know now over what I had no idea I knew then. I’m a recent art student (trainee artist). She is finding her way; she made the outfit by buying a colourful net from the covered market in the centre of town, near the church. It is such a long time ago, and it’s only now, as I look at the 35 mm slides, late at night with the light from an old Angle Poise, also bought in Cardiff from a junk shop. Only now can I say it is a series—an artwork. #pinktule #greentule #redtule’ [Instagram Screenshot].

In the post illustrated in Fig. 2, the caption is particularly helpful in clarifying the connections between Lloyd’s social media work and autotheory. The short text moves between the first and third person and between present and past temporalities: a processual narrative, and retrospective recognition of the early work as art, written in the first person, is interrupted and disrupted by a third person ‘she’ who is ‘finding her way,’ a long time ago and yet ‘of now’: Lloyd simultaneously addresses, and theorises the young artist she was when she made this early work. This interplay between past and present aligns with autotheoretical methodologies, which, as Fournier (2021) suggests, use self-narration and self-imaging as tools for theoretically interpreting lived experience. Lloyd’s phrasing, particularly ‘marking time’ and ‘making a place,’ signals an active process of reinscribing her early work into current theoretical discourse and reactivating it through her own live methodological concerns as described in her PhD thesis (Lloyd 2020 166; Thompson 2013; Grisewood and McCall 2012; Alexander 2015; Edensor 2010; Kwon 2002; Lippard 1997, 1999; Massey 2013). The retrospective acknowledgement ‘Only now that I can say it is a series–an artwork’ demonstrates how her social media practice functions as a means of ‘making the work anew’ (Lloyd 2022). This suggests a nonlinear temporality, where past artistic gestures are autotheoretically reactivated through representation and reinterpretation on Instagram. ‘Marking time’ and ‘making a place’ constitute contributions to a theory of Lloyd’s work as time and location-based intervention, which encompasses her early and recent work.

As previously mentioned, Instagram provided Lloyd with a platform for re-inserting herself into both art history and contemporary debates, enabling her to establish intertextual connections across different temporalities. This could sometimes be done by borrowing from autofictional modes of self-narration. An example of this is Fig. 3, where she retroactively embeds a quotation—as Lloyd herself defines it—through the hashtag ‘#KathyAckerquoting,’ placed in the caption of a digital photograph composed of a 1979 Polaroid self-portrait, posted on Instagram in 2019. Here, the early work is retrospectively diagnosed as ‘image quotation,’ and it could be interpreted as a visual quotation of Acker’s self-imaging; however, it seems more likely that Lloyd intends this quotation to refer to Acker’s whole persona and literary oeuvre. The plausibility of Acker directly influencing Lloyd’s early work is tenuous. As she herself notes in a comment on a subsequent post (@alisonclloyd 2 September 2022), Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School was not published in the UK until 1984. Yet Lloyd’s deliberate citation of Acker constructs a creative, wilful, and autofictional alignment with the radical writer. This act of self-inscription is not merely retrospective but functions as a strategic intervention into current feminist discourse, situating Lloyd’s archive within contemporary theoretical and artistic debates. The renewed critical and literary interest in Kathy Acker around the time of Lloyd’s post, spurred by Chris Kraus’s biography After Kathy Acker (2017) and Olivia Laing’s autofictional novel Crudo (2018), highlights the significance of Lloyd’s gesture in linking Acker to her early work. By citing Acker as an early influence, Lloyd constructs a narrative of her younger self that aligns with a lineage of feminist experimentation. Laing’s use of Acker as a fictionalised protagonist in Crudo demonstrates how literary autofiction can reanimate past voices within contemporary contexts—an approach that echoes Acker’s own practice of textual appropriation and parallels Lloyd’s own method of self-historicisation through image and caption (Honório 2023). Lloyd’s invocation of Acker also operates within feminist citation practice (Ahmed 2017:15), not as a passive homage but as an active self-positioning strategy, reinforcing the continued relevance of her own artistic contributions. By digitally recontextualising her early work through the lens of Acker’s radical legacy, Lloyd asserts the currency and legitimacy of her artistic and theoretical interventions both in the past and in the present, updating feminist historiography through the dynamic affordances of digital social media.

Fig. 3 @alisonclloyd 27 February 2019. ‘The days when I was inspired by Kathy Acker, June 1979, #kathyackerquoting’ [Instagram screenshot]

Pearl’s argument that autofictional techniques are mirrored in the performative self-curation practices of social media is particularly relevant in understanding Lloyd’s strategic use of Instagram (2019). In autofiction, the author-character is deliberately constructed through self-fictionalisation. This is similarly enacted in networked communication, where social media platforms facilitate the construction of a curated self-image, continuously edited and reframed over time. Pearl’s claim that networked media fosters a curatorial ethos of self-narration is particularly evident in Lloyd’s strategic use of Instagram metadata, such as location markers and hashtags. For example, in her Instagram account @romilly_crescent_docs, Lloyd anchors her archival photographs within contemporary Cardiff by tagging locations from her past, suggesting an ongoing, fictionalised presence in the city. This echoes the way autofictional narratives construct fictionalised versions of the self, blurring the lines between personal history and artistic self-fashioning.

In a 2021 post on @alisonclloyd (17 July), Lloyd playfully claims she is ‘not running the account’ @romilly_crescent_docs, introducing a layer of fictionalisation that destabilises authorship. This aligns with Effe and Gibbons’s (2022: 65) account of autofiction, where readers navigate tensions between fact and fiction, activating different cognitive modes of engagement. In a recorded Zoom conversation, Lloyd described her motivations for launching @romilly_crescent_docs:

It just seemed like a really simple, secretive way of posting up for my own pleasure, my own interest, and my own enquiry—works from that series, which was almost all made at Romilly Crescent … I also realised which house number Romilly Crescent was, and it was a way to make connections to Cardiff and grow that connection. So, I followed up on things related to Cardiff—galleries, the Socialist Workers Party, artists from Cardiff, and the Cardiff College of Art. A couple of years ago, I also started posting about politics in Cardiff or COVID in Wales. I liked that people could almost imagine I was there (Lloyd & Ruocco 2023).

This ‘secretive’ and self-reflexive practice exemplifies the oscillatory reading mode Effe and Gibbons describe, as followers shift between interpreting Lloyd’s posts as documentary traces and as performative self-mythology.

Both Autotheory and Autofiction are characterised by the use of intertextuality, for example, citation and appropriation of found text within hybrid literary forms (Fournier 2022; Hughes 2002). Social media reposting practices and etiquette have fostered a habit of image quotation that resembles, in principle, academic quotation, as opposed to the appropriative practices by the artists of the Pictures Generations such as Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman, a group of artists active in the 1970s and 80s who used strategies such as re-photographing images and appropriating text from art, advertising or popular culture, often without crediting their original authors (Linden 2016).

Artistic strategies that seek to make visible preceding generations of women are a traditional tool of feminist art, from Judy Chicago (1974-1979) to Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye (1997) to Tai Shani’s (2014-2019) work. The concept of politics of citation, and feminist citation practice as a way of acknowledging and establishing feminist genealogies, where the work of women of colour is recognised and visible, has been pioneered by the philosopher Sara Ahmed who in ‘Living a Feminist Life,’ conceptualised citation as feminist memory, as celebration and recognition of women of colour’s contribution (Ahmed 2017: 15-16). Feminist citation practice is a powerful tool in intersectional feminist pedagogy and scholarship (Itchuaqiyaq and Frith, 2022; Williams, 2022). In the chapter ‘Citation as Relation: Intertextual Intimacies and Identifications,’ Fournier examines artistic and literary approaches to citation as intertextual intimacy in queer feminist contexts (Fournier 2021: 133-174). With my concept of auto-citation, I am extending the logic of feminist citation to Lloyd’s use of digital technologies to remediate and ‘quote’ her own early analogue photography on social media, the artist’s older ‘self’ appropriating and reactivating her early work by uploading it to digital networks and communities in an arguably materially impoverished (Steyerl 2011) but intertextually upgraded form (Lloyd 2022).

In ‘Living a feminist life’ Ahmed describes the effort of queer women of colour to ‘write ourselves into existence’ (Ahmed 2017: 230). Although as a white, relatively privileged woman artist who pioneered feminist self-portraiture in the 1970s and 1980s, albeit one whose work remained unseen at the time, the marginalisations that impacted Lloyd are different from those affecting the writers to whom Ahmed refers, I still consider the latter’s concept of ‘feminist citation practice’ (Ahmed 2017) an important tool for this project to examine Lloyd’s insistent willing to visibility of her work. In her seminal text The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), Hélène Cixous asserts that ‘woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and history—by her own movement’ (Cixous 1976: 875). This imperative for self-inscription finds contemporary resonance in Ahmed’s concept of the wilful subject (2014), which posits wilfulness as a form of resistance to dominant structures of power—an insistence on presence that disrupts normative expectations of behaviour, discourse, and visibility. Wilful subjects refuse erasure, persistently asserting their agency even when perceived as disruptive or excessive (Ahmed 2014: 203).

Lloyd’s digital self-historicisation exemplifies this wilful act of self-inscription. By digitising, sharing, and recontextualising her early works through social media, she actively refused the invisibility that had previously obscured her practice. Her engagement with hashtags, captions, and durational online interactions functioned as a performative rewriting of her artistic legacy, aligning with both Cixous’s call for self-authorship and Ahmed’s theorisation of feminist persistence. Building on these frameworks, I propose auto-citation as a critical feminist strategy. Lloyd’s repeated return to her own archive on Instagram was not merely an act of recollection but an assertion of presence, continuity, and historical reclamation, bringing her work into legibility within both contemporary and art-historical discourses. In this sense, auto-citation functions as a digital mode of wilful feminist historiography, plugging self-authored artistic visibility into an art world landscape where institutional recognition of women artists of her generation remains precarious (Nochlin 1971; Pollock 1983; Schor 1991; Reckitt 2016; Moser & Reckitt 2016; Meisel 2020).

#editingarthistory: the Evolution of Auto-Citation in @alisonclloyd

Lloyd launched her @alisonclloyd Instagram account on 17 March 2014, initially using the platform in ways typical of artists at the time. Her early posts documented a diverse range of content, including her walking art practice, personal life, activism, curatorial projects, and photographic experiments, adhering to the conventions of Instagram’s visual culture: flatlays, mirror selfies, and carefully composed images of domestic and social spaces (Saltz 2014; Manovich 2016, 2017; Eckel et al. 2018).

Lloyd’s engagement with archival material began on 30 April 2014, with a Polaroid from 1978, later exhibited in Women in Revolt (Young 2023) under the title Romilly Crescent, Cardiff, Watching. The image, caption-less, was initially shared in black and white, placed over the cover of Graham Greene’s novel The Human Factor (Fig. 4), then a colour photograph of the same polaroid appeared two days later, this time held by Lloyd’s fingertip (Fig. 5), accompanied by the caption ‘continuing unease in the 21^st century.’ These photographs, likely taken with her mobile phone camera, marked the beginning of her digital reactivation of archival work. The decision to first present the image in monochrome and then in colour initiates the process of revisiting, reformatting, and annotating her archive through digital means.

Fig. 4 @alisonclloyd 30 April 2014 [Instagram screenshot]

Fig. 5 @alisonclloyd 2 May 2014. ‘continuing unease in the 21^st century’ [Instagram screenshot]

Despite the scarce follower engagement with these archival images (Fig.5 collected no likes or comments), this approach evolved into a distinctive strategy: Lloyd began regularly re-photographing her analogue works, frequently positioning them on top of printed materials–such as magazines or books from different periods, as seen in Fig. 4. See for example @alisonclloyd 28 April 2019, where the artist rephotographed an early self-portrait after placing it atop a copy of Studio International from 1976 (Fig. 6). Particularly notable is Lloyd’s use of hashtags to make her purpose clear: ‘#editingarthistory #studiointernational #insertingmyselfinarthistory.’ These compositions echo the temporary collage techniques present in her early works, demonstrating a continuity in her approach across time and media. Images featuring herself and her subjects interacting with photographs, magazines, and other printed materials began to recur on her feed, illustrating her preoccupation with visually layering time.

Fig. 6 @alisonclloyd 28 April 2019. ‘play…#editingarthistory #studiointernational #writingnotwalking #alisonwares #insertingmyselfinarthistory’ [Instagram screenshot]

Between May and September 2014, Lloyd posted a series of digitally re-photographed vintage prints featuring Jake, a young man in sunglasses, holding a 1979 issue of Vogue magazine, with a photograph of a female model bearing a resemblance to Lloyd on the cover (see Fig. 7). These compositions recall the Pictures Generation’s strategies of appropriation and re-photography, in which artists such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince interrogated authorship and the construction of mass media images (Crimp 1979). The sequence culminated in a post captioned ‘JAKE and #Vogue 1979,’ explicitly connecting her rephotographed images to the historical moment in which they were originally produced.

Fig. 7 @alisonclloyd 11 September 2014. ‘JAKE and #Vogue 1979’ [Instagram screenshot]

A 17 January 2015 post titled #experiments, #alison’s place (Fig. 8) features a ‘shelfie’ of a Frieze magazine cover displaying a work by Anne Collier, a contemporary artist whose practice of re-photographing found images resonates with methodologies pioneered by the Pictures Generation. Collier had a solo exhibition alongside Jack Goldstein, one of the original ‘Pictures’ artists, at Nottingham Contemporary in 2011, which Lloyd would certainly have seen, being based in Nottingham (Nottingham Contemporary 2011; Noble 2011). By referencing Collier in her Instagram post, Lloyd establishes a direct dialogue with contemporary reconsiderations of the Picture Generation, linking her own work to artists engaged in critical image appropriation.

Lloyd’s practice of re-photographing her own early works and integrating them into contemporary digital circulation continued through posting digital scans of her negatives. Her 2017 and 2018 posts (Figs 9-10) include scans of early self-portraits holding a camera, visually echoing Collier’s rephotographed found photos of women with cameras, while also functioning as ‘protoselfies’—a term that situates these works within the broader discourse on self-imaging and authorship (Saltz 2014; Senft & Baym 2015; Peraica 2017; Raymond 2021; Colquhoun 2023).

While Lloyd’s reactivation of archival images for social media parallels Collier’s interrogations of photographic representation, there is a key distinction: Collier’s work critically examines how women have been historically depicted in relation to photographic apparatus, often as passive subjects in commercial imagery (Fox 2010; Grabner 2014; Atallah 2016). In contrast, Lloyd’s intervention is self-referential—she is not critiquing or recontextualising an external or found archive, but instead reclaiming her own, reasserting her artistic presence by actively encoding her past work into contemporary feminist and art historical debates.

Fig. 8 @alisonclloyd 17 January 2015. ‘experiments. #alison’s place’ [Instagram screenshot]

Fig. 9 @alisonclloyd 17 August 2017. ‘Red Alison 1980 (Alison by Alison) #earlywork #southend #worklikeawoman #workliketheymeanit #walkingforpleasure #alisonswares #endofroll #womenlookatwomen #endofthefilmroll’ [Instagram screenshot]

Fig. 10 @alisonclloyd 8 May 2018. ‘Me and my Camera 1980. Pre Supervision nerves’ [Instagram screenshot]

Another striking example of Lloyd’s auto-citation strategy is her deliberate infiltration of the #womenlookatwomen hashtag, associated with a 2018 exhibition curated by Paola Ugolini at Richard Saltoun Gallery. The exhibition featured a group of international women artists of her generation, in which Lloyd was not included. In response, she ensured that her work maintained a significant presence in the hashtag’s feed, linking her archive to the recovery of women artists of her generation in institutional and art market contexts (Reynolds 2018). This act of digital self-insertion not only reaffirmed her presence alongside her peers but also exemplified her broader methodology – leveraging social media as both an artistic tool and a historiographical intervention to reclaim space within feminist art history. Further reinforcing this approach, Lloyd rephotographed her work within the context of the hashtag feed by taking a screenshot and reposting it, captioning it as ‘making my own archive’ (Fig. 10). Within this screenshot, 8 out of 11 images were from Lloyd’s own archive, while the remaining three featured works by exhibited artists Elisabetta Catalano, Annegret Soltau, and Friedl Kubelka. In the accompanying caption, Lloyd explicitly described her strategy, stating that she had ‘infiltrated’ the hashtag to establish connections between her early work and that of her contemporaries in the exhibition.

A review of the #womenlookatwomen hashtag feed today reveals that Lloyd’s images continue to coexist alongside those of the artists formally included in the exhibition, visually affirming her presence within this artistic network. She even used the hashtag to post a screenshot of her own intervention, creating a mise en abyme of her bold digital re-insertion into art history and into the programming of a prestigious London commercial gallery dedicated to rediscovering overlooked women artists (Art Basel n.d.). This gesture should not be dismissed as merely an entrepreneurial social media strategy. Lloyd’s transparency in documenting her process affirms its artistic intent—an assertion of presence rather than an attempt at self-promotion. While it is undeniable that her Instagram activity contributed to her eventual institutional recognition, as curator Linsey Young acknowledged in her obituary for the artist (Young 2024), Lloyd’s approach was, above all, an artistic intervention.

As I have shown, unlike feminist citation practice, which is oriented toward acknowledging marginalised voices within feminist discourse (Ahmed 2017), Lloyd extends her citation practice to her own early work. Her practice of feminist auto-citation emerged early in her engagement with Instagram as a strategy of re-inscription, ensuring her work’s visibility within historical narratives through digital means. Initially, she rephotographed her early analogue images alongside printed materials, incorporating direct image quotations from both past and present sources. She then transitioned to digitising her negatives, ultimately culminating in the act of screen-grabbing her own archive’s digital incarnation as part of an intervention within a gallery exhibition hashtag.

Lloyd’s digital re-insertion strategy operates on multiple levels. As an act of archival retrieval and remediation, it ensures that her early self-portraiture is made visible. As a performative intervention, it transforms remediation into an active and engaged conversation with a diverse online community. As a theoretical contribution, it installs live theorisation within processual digital spaces through her use of captions and comments to record and share analysis and reflection. By controlling the terms of her own rediscovery, Lloyd not only subverted conventional art-historical frameworks but also modelled a form of self-authored historicisation and self-theorisation, one that directly engages with feminist theories of self-inscription (Cixous 1976; Spivak 1988).

Fig. 11 @alisonclloyd 13 February 2018 ‘I have been infiltrating the #womenlookatwomen for this exhibition as many of my photographs from the 1970s and 80s looked at women; myself and others. This screen shot includes 3 outstanding images from the Women Look at Women exhibition. The others are mine. NB I’m not in this exhibition. This is an install of well-known artists from UK and US some of whom are a similar generation to myself. Others a decade or more older … Creating my own archive’[Instagram Screenshot]

Beyond individual self-historicisation, Lloyd actively engaged with wider feminist artistic genealogies. Her Instagram presence served as a space for intertextual dialogue, aligning her practice with rediscoveries, such as Janice Guy’s (@romilly_crescent_docs, 6 May 2022), and conversations with peers, including Barbara Hammer (@alisonclloyd, 16 March 2019). This strategic referencing highlights the communal dimensions of feminist auto-citation, in which visibility is secured not through institutional validation but through interconnection and mutual recognition within feminist networks. However, this model of digital historiography remains highly contingent on external corporate forces, which hinder the functioning of feminist archival practices within increasingly unstable, engagement-driven platforms such as Instagram. The de-prioritisation of still images within the platform’s algorithmic economy and infrastructure poses a fundamental challenge to the long-term sustainability of digital self-archiving as an artistic and politically engaged practice. Lloyd’s case highlights the paradox of attempting to ‘make one’s own archive’ within a system that is structurally opposed to permanence, raising urgent questions about how artists and historians must navigate digital infrastructures that prioritise profit over any other consideration.

Conclusion: Digitising Herself into Art History

Through the iterative act of posting, annotating, and engaging with contemporary online discourse, Lloyd transformed her early work into new work within a dynamic, evolving narrative—one that resists the fixity of institutional archives and instead embraces the fluid, interactive potential of social media. Her social media practice foregrounds digital self-imaging as a performative act, one that is not merely about recovering past works but about appropriating and repurposing them, actively rewriting her artistic legacy in real-time as a feminist intervention. In this article, I have conceptualised this process as feminist auto-citation: a new theoretical framework that contributes to feminist art historiography by recognising the digital sphere as a site of self-authored visibility and historiographic agency.

Lloyd’s engagement with feminist citation practice aligns with Ahmed’s assertion that ‘citation is feminist memory’ (Ahmed 2017: 15), but her approach extends this idea further. By strategically referencing feminist predecessors and positioning her own archive in dialogue with contemporary debates and the recuperation of artists of her generation, Lloyd inscribed herself into an art historical narrative that had overlooked her early contributions. Her approach represents an extension of the traditional feminist citation to what I have termed feminist auto-citation. This practice reclaims visibility through repeated acts of remediation and recontextualisation of one’s early works. This article demonstrates the originality of Lloyd’s method and my analysis by showing how digital platforms like Instagram can serve as both an archival tool and a site of live theorisation, where captions, hashtags, and visual juxtapositions operate as feminist gestures of memory, resistance, and authorship. Lloyd’s insistent digital reactivation of archival images demonstrates how social media can function as both an archival tool and a site of live theoretical intervention. Her willingness to continuously reassert her presence through digital remediation of early analogue photographs aligns with Ahmed’s notion of wilful subjects: those who refuse erasure by persistently re-embedding themselves in structures from which they have historically been excluded (Ahmed 2014).

Through a close analysis of Lloyd’s decade-long practice on Instagram, I have demonstrated how she encoded her legacy through remediation and intertextual references, claiming a space in contemporary feminist and art historical debates. Her work exemplifies a new mode of critical, platform-based historiography that is simultaneously aesthetic, political, and theoretical in nature. Lloyd’s practice exemplifies how artists can leverage digital tools to resist historical marginalisation and assert agency over their own representation. However, as social media platforms continue to evolve, the precarity of this strategy underscores the urgent need for critical engagement with digital infrastructures and their role in shaping contemporary feminist artistic legacies. What alternative strategies might be necessary to ensure that social media artists’ archives are not lost to technological obsolescence? What platforms could be a better home for activist and artistic communities?

By digitising herself into existence, Lloyd carved out a space for her work within feminist art history—one that, despite its precarity, continues to resonate as a model for future digital feminist re-inscriptions. Her work invites us to reconsider how we document, cite, and historicise women’s artistic contributions in the digital age, as well as how we might build more sustainable, autonomous, and community-led platforms for feminist art historiography that transcend the constraints of corporate-controlled networks. While this article offers a preliminary examination of Lloyd’s strategies, further scholarly investigation is needed to fully articulate the complexity of her contribution. Given the ephemerality of digital platforms, future research should also consider strategies for preserving her online legacy, ensuring that her pioneering engagement with digital self-archiving on social media remains accessible for future generations.

Acknowledgements

This article was initially conceived as a collaboration between the author and Alison Lloyd, grounded in their long-standing friendship and ongoing dialogue about photography and social media. They met during their PhD studies at Loughborough University and became close friends, both in person and online. Lloyd passed away in January 2024, before this piece was completed. Writing it alone, Ruocco returned to Lloyd’s posts and their conversations as a way of continuing the exchange. This text is offered in loving memory of Alison Lloyd and her remarkable work. The author would like to express her gratitude to Lloyd’s family for their trust and support, as well as to the editors and reviewers of this issue for their thoughtful and generous engagement. Here is a zine published by John Marchant Gallery in Brighton, where Ruocco commemorates her friend, Alison Lloyd: Alison Lloyd Zine