The globalisation of the great outdoors photography. The relationship with the wilderness. The cult of the image and the online social networks.
Let me start with the first one. The great outdoors photography. I guess we all like to look at some perfect landscape shots and fantasize about some great trip to some amazing destination.
But sometimes you realize that things are not as linear as that anymore. There is the great landscape, the great place to be. And then there is the great shot, the perfectly photogenic corner. The two things are not the same.
We are so bombarded by these visual stimuli that sometimes we forget the difference between the two. So many times during our trip we found ourselves surrounded by hordes of tourist, wanderers, hipsters taking every time the same exact picture with the same exact angle while never actually venturing into the landscape for real.
I guess there’s a kind of dictatorship of tastes and trends that just leads to a huge homogenization of contents where all the pictures look the same, all the picturesque – or let’s say the most Instagramesque – spots are worthy to be photographed and very few people are able to set themselves aside from this multitude.
So along our trip we slowly started to realize that somehow every interesting landscape we came across seemed like a deja-vu of some shot already posted on Instagram. How much does the daily dose of Instagram adventure-kind of images influence our whole perception of what is considered a beautiful photograph? Yes, I never realized so clearly how very stereotyped these images are. In fact, seeing in person all these famous corners of the US made me think a lot about our relationship with the landscape and the photographic image. Somehow it seems that there are places on Earth where if you didn’t take that specific kind of picture – of the girl looking at the landscape from an elevated point, or the guy shooting a self-portrait (mmm, sorry… a selfie) with his selfie-stick, it is like you’ve never been there. Or worse, it is like it was not worth the trip. Furthermore, it made me wonder about our current way of enjoying nature and the outdoors. But that’s another story.
