If both Stephen Shore and Dayanita Singh are often registering evidence of a settled world, there is something more dynamic happening in Gueorgui Pinkhassov’s photography. Pinkhassov, who was born in Moscow and now lives in Paris, is one of the world’s leading photojournalists, though the label fits him badly. ‘‘Assignments are the best pretext for turning up in a new environment,’’ Pinkhassov wrote to me. ‘‘But I value myself more as an amateur than as a professional.’’ Amateur — that is the word for him, with its declaration of love for the craft. He is a camera artist in love with light, color and immediacy.

When you see an image by Pinkhassov, you recognize it. The picture plane is active with a complex scatter of light, and there is frequently a dense, dramatic skein of shadows out of which, as though by magic, coherent shapes emerge: a head here, a foot there, some shape in silhouette, fishermen’s nets, smoke, faces, some other shape in fragmentary form. After a moment, the entire ensemble becomes legible. His oneiric images always seem to be on the verge of movement, as though he made the picture while the scene was still being born, before it was fully deposited into its own reality.

Pinkhassov has taken this talent for eliciting a primordial energy from everyday life to its next logical step: He now posts short videos of similarly abstract, swirling, evolving scenes. The poetic grace and precise timing in both his published and Instagram work make sense when you consider two of his main influences: Andrei Tarkovsky (for whose film ‘‘Stalker’’ Pinkhassov was invited to shoot stills in 1979) and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He credits them both with leading him to the idea that ‘‘reality contains enough material out of which one can weave poetic images without filters.’’ But even within the parameters of a style, Pinkhassov’s images are charged with a perpetual element of surprise — he says he would rather be a ‘‘stove’’ than a ‘‘refrigerator,’’ would rather cook than keep. The effect of seeing a new picture by him, as you scroll down the Instagram feed, is often a jolt of wonder and gratitude.

Instagram, like any other wildly successful social-media platform, is by turns creative, tedious, fun and ridiculous. If you follow the wrong people, it can easily become a millstone around your neck. (There can be mild, but real, social costs to following and then unfollowing.) But the activity of individual photographers is an area in which it can be revelatory — not for the stunning individual image but for the new seams of insight it reveals. ‘‘The conversation you have with a friend you speak with every day is different from one that you have with a friend you speak with once a month or once a year’’ is how Stephen Shore put it in an email. Instagram, he says, ‘‘can have the taste of the more intimate, more perhaps seemingly trivial daily conversation.’’

Once we’ve fallen in love with an artist’s work, isn’t one of the things we most long for to get inside that artist’s head, to somehow get closer to the creative process? This is why we read interviews, it is why we look at sketchbooks, it is why we pore over contact sheets. Instagram, at its best, can replicate aspects of this directness; it can be a conversation that unfolds gradually, over weeks and months. We see how an obsession develops and not simply what it looks like once it is on the walls of a museum or between the pages of a book. One part of the thrill is knowing that it is not happening anywhere else with such intimacy or immediacy. Another is the bittersweet fact of its evanescence: Like all conversation, it happens when it happens, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.