Is Photography Ruining the Outdoors?

[lunarbo]

Have just spent the last 2 weeks in Vegas,Grand Canyon ,Death Valley and San Francisco. I cannot tell you how much the mobile phone selfie has intruded onto the beauty spots.
There have also been queues to take selfies in front of The Bridge, The Vegas Sign, this was bad enough but I got the feeling people didn’t even look at the beauty of the Natural Wonders
Ah well their loss I guess. With patience I managed to get the shots I wanted .......

[Tronhard]

Have just spent the last 2 weeks in Vegas,Grand Canyon ,Death Valley and San Francisco. I cannot tell you how much the mobile phone selfie has intruded onto the beauty spots.
There have also been queues to take selfies in front of The Bridge, The Vegas Sign, this was bad enough but I got the feeling people didn’t even look at the beauty of the Natural Wonders
Ah well their loss I guess. With patience I managed to get the shots I wanted .......

Sadly I think they are too busy being self-engaged... I read a study not that long ago where people going to a beauty spot were quizzed about what they had observed. Photographers scored the highest on observation, then non-photographers and then, by some margin, selfie takers.
I had expected the second and third places to be reversed but apparently not...

[CP140]

Sadly I think they are too busy being self-engaged... I read a study not that long ago where people going to a beauty spot were quizzed about what they had observed. Photographers scored the highest on observation, then non-photographers and then, by some margin, selfie takers.
I had expected the second and third places to be reversed but apparently not...

That is not too unexpected. The photographer is thinking about capturing an image, the non-photographer has their head up on a swivel drinking in all the sights around them whereas the selfie taker is all about putting themselves in front of something to prove they were there.

Immersing yourself in the culture when you travel is half the adventure. Seeing the iconic sites is the other half.

When we (my much, much better half and I) travel, we prefer to hire/rent an apartment or cottage instead of staying in a hotel. There is nothing quite like buying groceries in a foreign country to humble you... and every Holiday Inn is pretty much the same.

[Tronhard]

There is nothing quite like buying groceries in a foreign country to humble you... and every Holiday Inn is pretty much the same.

Ha! Your comment reminds me of an experience my wife and I had. We were moving to Canada and while she was Canadian, I had to go through a process to become a resident, and I was doing that in London. It was taking a long time and it was cheaper to go to wait things out in Spain. We got a time share unit in Malaga and indeed went shopping for groceries at a supermarket called Diplo. Not speaking Spanish we struggled a bit with some of the labelling and we went home with the materials to make meat pasta. I was cooking and my wife decided to consume some of the wine we had bought. I later discovered that it contained a massive amount of alcohol, so when I came out to serve the food, she was sitting in a rather drowsy condition at the table, having apparently emptied a decent proportion of the bottle.

As I went to get my own plate I heard a sound and came back to discover that she had fallen face first into her dinner and her head lay sideways across the plate as she gently blew pasta bubbles. What could I do..? I took a picture, and then rescued her. That was the end of our dinner as she was out for the count. I never dared to show the photo to anyone except her...

[LePetomane]

This creature was a casualty of the selfie crowd last year about this time. The bear (with a cub and yearling) was near the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Traffic was stopped in both directions and people were getting pretty close to the animals. A week later I read that the bears were euthanized.

[mariah]

Yes I have also noticed the point you are making. Even eight years ago there was nothing like this. Visiting a park was like visiting a park, not like seeing many people posing for a picture. It all about social media trend. So many people are now insta gram influencer. Others are just busy copying them.

[Tronhard]

To me photography is not ruining the outdoors, because to me, selfie-taking is not true photography - it's a form of narcissistic self-gratification that has little to do with the places these people frequent. I agree that social media sites, promoting influencers, have created a population of copycats whose sole purpose is to be noticed and get likes.

I see people roll up to amazingly beautiful spots, turn to look away and take the shot of them blocking the scenery, then immediately go off to tick their next box. They seem to have no interest or concept of the context of the places they visit, and often little respect for them. So many places of beauty have been despoiled by hoards of Instagram users.

I think travel photography is a fine thing to do, (I've done a lot of it myself) but for me the image is not about me, it's about the place and the people, and it's about showing respect for both. I know I was there - I took the shot - so I don't need to be in the photo!

[LenR]

"The common thread, as Manfred has allude to, is the fact that these people travel in packs, isolated from the local culture and that dehumanizes them - they have, as it were, no 'skin in the game' and no sense of community responsibility. As cheap travel has made individual touring easier the coach has been replaced by backpackers, air b&b etc. but the speed with which they travel, and in fact the reason for their travel, still undermines the experience for both them and those locals they come into contact with"

Agreed. So many of our iconic mountain park locations are swamped with tourists of the kind alluded to above. Morraine Lake, amongst others in Banff NP are particularly overcrowded.
It has come to the point that I now seldom bother to go up.

[Thlayle]

I will throw in a post-script to my OP since I see a few recent comments:

I just came back from a road trip across the US that I started before the Covid-19 thing got going. My main impression is that as the outbreak slowly progressed into a pandemic, the numbers of people visiting the parks began increasing. Some of this was "business as usual" - as in the case of New Orleans, which we visited well before Mardi Gras, where everyone flocked to the city amidst growing evidence of a dangerous spread. After the fact, Louisiana became a hotspot.

Then there were the seasonal "spring break" travelers. We were at Joshua Tree before they began rolling in, but afterwards the park was flooded with people and, like the community of Moab near Arches, the local community began begging people to stay away.

By the time we hit east Texas on our return journey, several states had issued shelter-in-place orders, and yet we saw groups of people arriving in campgrounds, several RVs and tent campers (about 20 people in all), to party and pass the time, apparently feeling safe since they were away from urban areas. So for them it was both "business as usual" and a flagrant disregard for warnings about going out and mingling in public.

So I'd say that photography is only part of the problem. The interest in it does bring hoards of people to the same spots, regardless of any possible consequences to the environment or even themselves, and then there's the selfie-takers who just can't resist swarming on and in front of the points of interest. Photography helps speed/accelerate this along, but the real problem is the selfishness, the attitude that leads people to seek out and consume without any apparent care for their possible impact.

[Tringa]

From the posts so far here it is not so much photography ruining the outdoors, rather it is people, or more correctly some people.

It largely seems to be those who, having heard/seen of an area on social media, in books, a TV series, a movie or a travel guide, flock there, and, as already said appear to need to feature in many of the shots they take.

I could be wrong but I think many have little interest in the area, other than to be able to say - "I've been to XXX"

In the current situation with Corvid-19 fewer people are moving around in the UK and a number of areas, eg the Highlands and Cornwall, have asked people not visit and even more so not to use remote areas as a refuge from urban centres.

Dave

[bralk]

Kodak?

[Ken MT]

I agree, in New Zealand, without overseas visitors (3.82 million in 2018) there are a lot less selfies being taken.