From Ryan Trecartin’s Vimeo-art to David Hockney’s iPad paintings, visual thinkers are often the first to embrace and experiment with new technology. It’s no surprise then that Stephen Shore, the American wunderkind who led color photography’s art vanguard in the ’70s, should have adopted the social medium of Instagram with such boyish enthusiasm. So fervent is the 67-year-old’s interest, that for this past year he has been shooting on the picture-sharing site almost exclusively — a practice he describes as “taking fun seriously.” This weekend, together with Jennifer Higgie (the editor of the art magazine Frieze), Shore takes part in a talk about Instagram at Photo London, a brand-new photographic fair in the British capital that starts tomorrow at Somerset House.

“There’s something special about Instagram,” Shore says from his home in upstate New York. “An Instagram image doesn’t have to be the same as a picture you’d hang on a gallery wall; it’s more of a visual notation.” Shore’s diaristic posts — a mix of cloudscapes, forest floors and the façades of ramshackle buildings, often observed while out walking with his wife, Ginger (the former picture editor at Fortune magazine and fellow Instagram fanatic) — have so far garnered him 41.1k followers. “These things aren’t necessarily enough to make a standalone photograph,” Shore concedes. “But they make perfectly fine posts. I don’t see that as a deficiency. I see that as one of the joys Instagram allows for a certain kind of playfulness.”

This clearly isn’t the first wave of innovation that Shore has ridden. In fact, he likens the notational quality of his square-shaped and filter-less iPhone posts to the Kodak snapshot format he used to exhibit his 1972 series, “American Surfaces.” Beyond its glance-like feel, he’s invested in the app’s capacity as a connective tool: “This is the first time I’ve really understood the idea of a digital social community,” says Shore, a generous “liker,” who frequently falls down the rabbit hole of family, friends and fellow photography lover’s feeds. “I’ve actually met new people there, and it feels like they’re friends because I see their visual thinking so clearly.” But what would his latter-day companion, Andy Warhol, have thought of the site? “Warhol would have loved it. He often documented whole days in the Factory on Polaroid or audio recorder,” he says. “People are using Instagram in exactly the same way today.”

Photo London runs May 21 through 24 at Somerset House, Strand, London photolondon.org. “On Instagram: Jennifer Higgie and Stephen Shore” is on Sunday, May 24 at 5:30 p.m.