The scalloped outline of Angkor Wat had a way of making itself known in the darkness, and only sharpened as the sun peeked over the horizon. It was January, and I stood at the edge of a lake north of Siem Reap, Cambodia, wielding a paper cup of stale instant coffee in one hand and my iPhone in the other. The sacred temple is the stuff of travel fantasy and had been on my must-see list for years.
Like a bad motivational speaker, I’m a sucker for a good sunrise and Angkor Wat was delivering. This was the edifice that had survived since the 12th century and had miraculously been spared the Khmer Rouge’s rod of destruction during Cambodia’s 1970s genocide. It has inspired sages for generations and graces everything from the labels of local beers to the set of “Tomb Raider,” an architectural wonder draped in a sheet of spiritual mystery and marvel.
I took a breath and a sip, then raised my iPhone to the sky. Thirty seconds of cropping and captioning later, I posted on Instagram an odious, travel-envy shot of the moment, knowing very well that most of my friends back in New York City were cold, miserable urban yetis. Meanwhile, I was eating, praying and loving and now there was a 1080-by-1080-pixel image to prove it.
It sounds like a moment of pure trekking ecstasy. But it was fraudulent.
I didn’t post what was behind me.
That scene — the fight for the perfect Instagram — is one I’ve witnessed over and over, on at least three continents during the last year or so. At times, it felt like destinations were morphing into mere photo sets. In New Zealand, I saw adventure companies that made getting the perfect photo-op part of their pitch for kayaking, hiking or ziplining expeditions. In Thailand, a woman next to me on a beach squealed to her friends about getting her hair just right for a shot destined for her Tinder profile. Back home in New York, I have more than once found myself in the crosshairs of a narcisstick aimed at a scraggly Elmo in Times Square.
Our desire to get the perfect sharable photo has even led to deaths by selfie, with Mashable reporting that in 2015 more people died from taking selfies than shark attacks. Last year, Disneyland banned selfie sticks at its theme parks, citing safety as a concern. The Russian government even released a guide for how not to die taking one, kicking the “safe selfies” movement into motion.
To be sure, these are extremes. But as I stood there in Cambodia, swatted by selfie sticks, bruised by elbows, perfumed by the body odor of my fellow photogs, I realized the irony of being at a temple in which no one was really present. Was Instagram ruining travel?
The phenomenon of photography annoying tourists is far from new. My parents wielded disposal cameras and Polaroids with the best of them, occasionally begging for at least one decent photo of my brother and me at the state fair, in front of the Golden Gate bridge, or smiling half-heartedly next to a mascot. My grandparents and their peers surely sat through the tediousness of home movies, slideshow sessions or guided photo album tours from friends and neighbors who were all too eager to brag about their recent safari or trip to Niagara Falls. Today, I treasure those family photos, especially the ones of generations of awkward siblings. But it never felt like the chronicling was the purpose of the trip, rather it was an afterthought.
Which seems like a contrast to this scene I observed at Legoland in Carlsbad, Calif., last month.
As I strolled by, and snapped a picture of the parents taking pictures, I couldn’t help but think that Susan Sontag would have relished this. In her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Sontag wrote that cameras were “predatory weapons,” that they are “fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.” The camera, she said, was replacing the gun, “the hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture.”
The technological roots of the travel selfie run far deeper than the smartphone. Sontag pointed out that for the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly could leave their normal environments for spurts of time, a phenomenon that sites like Kayak.com have only expanded. Proof of a voyage started to feel necessary. Photographs offer “indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had,” she wrote. Or, create the illusion that fun was had.
Sontag argued that some travelers brandish their cameras to relieve “the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun,” Sontag said. “They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”
Even as Instagram defines our visual moment, we use the app’s filters to travel backwards in time, to make our images resemble the Polaroids of yore by casting them literally in a different, more nostalgic light.
“It empowers them,” John R. Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University and author of Psychology of the Digital Age said of Instagram filter users. “It allows them to be artistic. It helps them modify the emotional feeling of a photo. It enables them to ‘pretty up’ the photo, which means they can make their selfies more attractive in order to create their ideal self.”
The phenomena of taking photos and sharing them isn’t new, but with Instagram being mobile, both have become cheaper and faster, producing the instant gratification of knowing how our shots look in our palms. With a simple interface and clean squares, we can easily sort the seemingly infinite amount of life we take in everyday, consciously and unconsciously.
Taking a photo and posting it on Instagram, with or without a mug in the frame, is a way for all of us to become our own historians, grasping at tangible evidence of our time on the planet.
“Instagram,” Suler said, “is therefore a tool for validating one’s life.”
That feeling — that we’re all the stars of our own movie, manufacturing our own image, coming to terms with our own personal narratives— has been at the heart of the research for my second book, “The Kevin Show.” The book will tell the story of Kevin Hall, an Olympic sailor who has what Dr. Joel Gold has dubbed “Truman Show Disorder,” a form of manic depression (bipolar disorder) in which people, during their manic highs, think they’re the star of their own reality TV show.
What Dr. Gold is referring to and Hall experiences is particularly intense, but one could argue that mental illnesses fall on the extremes of a spectrum — heightened versions of things everyone experiences. One can feel sad from time to time, but not everyone who is sad will be clinically depressed. One may be joyous, but not spiral into a manic high.
So, where does one draw the line between sanity and an extreme, if we’re all trying to create our own “show”?
As a journalist and longtime photographer, I love Instagram and the connection it gives me to my friends and family as I journey afar, or for me to view their lives from my perch back home. But who was I to judge those brandishing their elbows and selfie sticks when, at a place like Angkor Wat, I, too, was guilty of presenting a distorted reality?
The good news is that Instagram and digital photography can also have profound healing powers, David Krauss, a psychologist and photographer in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, told me. For more than 30 years, Krauss has asked patients to bring in images of friends and family as a catalyst for talking about family dynamics. He may ask patients to take photos of things that are important to them, or take five images that illustrate a particular problem, a visual way of sorting through feelings that may be more evocative. It’s a window, he said, into how someone collects the world.
“It’s how we want to represent ourselves,” Krauss said. “Essentially, we’ve all hired our own PR company. We’re saying, ‘I’m my own publicist.’”
Consider the selfie deaths. At first, it’s a phenomenon that seems absurd, but I realized that if I had to be honest, I, too, was guilty of jeopardizing my health in the name of a good Instagram.
Last summer, I went on a hiking expedition with friends that included Zion National Park, Horseshoe Canyon and the Grand Canyon — and this cliche shot in which I hoisted my sneakers off the ledge.
To get the shot, I was seated on the ledge, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time hiking and climbing. But still I WAS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF A CANYON. With or without my smartphone, it was stupid.
One of my travel companions on the trip was my friend Annie He, a full-time finance guru by day, who in her spare time has become an Instagram star, 60,000-followers strong. My friends and I often found ourselves screaming at her to not to get too close to ledges just to get the perfect shot.
Not pictured: The author and her friends screaming at @anniemal_ to get off the ledgeMonths after we returned to New York, I asked He about her relationship with photo sharing, particularly when personal safety was at risk.
He told me that she tries to put down her phone when traveling, but “the pull to share” gets her. She also sets her phone down when she finds herself more sucked into the images of others lives than her own.
“Everyone puts their best foot forward,” He said, “And we try so hard to make it all look so desirable, constantly, at the peril of tragedy by selfie stick. The thing that I, and I think society as a whole, is struggling with at this point in time is — what are the lines between our online personas and our real life ones?”
She told me about a time when she and some friends were wandering through tunnels in Harlem that were still in use by Amtrak. Between the picturesque graffiti and the rays of natural light coming in through slits, the tunnels were the dream urban exploration site.
“I definitely trolled around for snaps at the risk of my safety,” He said. With photo sharing now ubiquitous, the bar has been raised on what makes a strong shot — leading us to jeopardize the very thing we’re trying to capture: our lives.
That irony reminded me of yet another bit of Sontag wisdom. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability,” Sontag wrote. “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
So, whether at Angkor Wat, Times Square, or my breakfast table, I will continue to pay homage to the melt. But here’s to hoping that before clicking “share,” there’s a moment to enjoy the view and a sip of instant coffee. Without getting elbowed. Or poked with a selfie stick. Or tagging that photo #Instabruise.
