The proper response to this might have been, "Why? No one around to invade?"
Source: Lived in Germany, married into a Germanic family...
Picked up a German hitchhiker back in ‘77 going between the Grand Canyon and Phoenix. Just as I was especially enjoying the desert scenery, he volunteered the info that he found it boring.
You don't include yourself in holiday pix?
Heck, I've done it myself (never a Leica or Hasselblad) ...
This is not an entirely new concern.
From the introduction to The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, 1977:
"Ansel Adams was born in 1902, in San Francisco. He began to photograph the landscape of the American West more than fifty years ago, before the Model A had begun to replace the Model T. Before that time there were no superhighways, no motels, and no passenger airlines. San Francisco and New York were, by crack train, four splendid days apart.
In those days the world was still a reasonably commodious place, and it was natural to assume that its various parts would retain their discrete, articulated character if they could be protected from the depredations of the lumber, mineral, and water barons. Conservation was a matter of seeking the support of the people against the encroachment of the powerful few. If one could describe in photographs how much like Eden was Yosemite Valley the electorate would presumably save it from its exploiters. It was not foreseen that the people, having saved it , would consider it their own, nor that a million pink-cheeked Boy scouts, greening teenage backpackers, and middle-aged sightseers might, with the best of intentions, destroy a wilderness as surely as the most rapacious of lumbermen, who did his damage quickly and left the land to recover if it could.
It has developed, in other words, that to photograph beautifully a choice vestigial remnant of natural landscape is not necessarily to do a great favor to its future. This problem is now understood, intuitively or otherwise, by many younger photographers of talent, who tend to make landscapes of motifs that have already been fully exploited and that have therefore nowhere to go but up. It is difficult today for an ambitious young photographer to photograph a pristine snowcapped mountain without including the parking lot in the foreground as a self-protecting note of irony.
In these terms Adams' pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition. It is possible that Adams himself has come to sense this. The best of his later pictures have about them a nervous intensity that is almost shrill, a Bernini-like anxiety, the brilliance of a violin string stretched tight.
It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust, and belief that Adams has brough to it. If this is the case, his pictures are all the more precious, for that then stand as the last records, for the young and the future, of what they missed. For the aging -- for a little while -- they will be a souvenir of what was lost.
John Szarkowski"
No different than when the French, Germans, Brits, Japanese et all come to the big North American cities on holidays. Big cities are crowded to begin with and adding visitors in large numbers as happens in the summer, especially, just make them moreso. It's not a uniquely European or British or Asian or ... phenomenon.
Tourism, by its nature, encourages "the hordes". The destinations promote it because tourists are a significant source of revenue.
But there's a more fundamental question here. Why do we look down our noses at the phone snappers who often do not see what they're looking at? We Elite Photographers (tm) who drag a bunch of equipment around to "properly" photograph a destination can be seen doing much the same thing. I have seen all manner of people dragging around Nikon, Canon, and Leica kit just banging out pictures and clearly disconnected from the actual experience of it all.
I was quite fortunate. For some decades, my global trips were part of my jobs and I thus got to know some of the people and experience some of the culture. I used my downtime to photograph these places and thereby felt a lot more connected to the whole experience. These days, I find myself spending more time looking at things when I travel than I do photographing them. The photographs I do take are therefore much more considered.
I will stipulate that people who grew up in the all digital age tend, in my observation at least, to have much shorter attention spans and tend not to concentrate a lot on any one thing for very long. But that may be confirmation bias on my part. After all, I have now lived long enough to be entitled to say "These kids, these days ..."
As I indicated - rarely.
But never a "selfie".
You'd have to vacation in Mars to get pictures no one else has taken. What do you suggest? We all get rid of our cameras?I watched the video and was disturbed by the woman who tried to force her child into a hazardous location.
One thing that bothers me about the current phenomenon is that people line up to take essentially the same photograph. They want the same photographs they have seen on social media. I have taken more than my share of “tourist photographs”, but I make an effort to frame photographs and try to bring in objects of interest (I am not a pro). It seems that many of these photographers seen in the video are trying to conform to social media standards.
I watched the video and was disturbed by the woman who tried to force her child into a hazardous location.
One thing that bothers me about the current phenomenon is that people line up to take essentially the same photograph. They want the same photographs they have seen on social media. I have taken more than my share of “tourist photographs”, but I make an effort to frame photographs and try to bring in objects of interest (I am not a pro). It seems that many of these photographers seen in the video are trying to conform to social media standards.
You'd have to vacation in Mars to get pictures no one else has taken.
Park rangers in Sydney are closing tracks, closing lookouts and all types of nonsense to prevent idiots killing themselves in search of the perfect insta shot.
Even in what I consider to be suburbia.
Not necessarily.
If all one does is photograph the attraction, maybe.
But if one photographs the interaction between the attraction, the changing light, the changing weather, the people interacting with the attraction, the changeable elements of the scene and a myriad number of other variables, the possibilities are nearly endless.
There were millions of possible variations when I took this. I might be the only one who chose the one I chose. Who can tell?
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