Teju Cole's instagram feed just gave us a masterclass on human behaviour

He's a writer, photographer and artist. Salman Rushdie has called him one of the most 'gifted writers of his generation'. His writing has been described as a 'powerful and unnerving inquiry into the human soul'. Open City, his 2011 novel, won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

But Teju Cole's real genius may be his use of social media - he has close to 200,000 followers on Twitter - to tell stories in new, contemporary ways - without in any way losing the complexity and insight so intrinsic to his work.

Except, sometime last year, he took a Twitter sabbatical. And quietly, started to tell stories on a different medium.

Earlier this month, we started to notice on his Instagram a slew of bad - in some cases terrible - photographs of the Mona Lisa.

The first few pictures had no captions. The next few did. And while his 3700 odd Instagram followers scratched their heads to figure out why he would do such a heinous thing, he put out the disclaimer.

The photographs aren't his.

Over a few weeks, Cole has created what can only be called an essay on Instagram using reposted images of the Mona Lisa - and, through them, has thrown into sharp focus a range of human behaviour, from the profound to the side-splittingly funny.

Here, a curated snapshot of insights from this ongoing series.