Tourism today
When I started this website (12 years ago) and subsequently this blog (almost 9 years ago), tourism and how we talk about tourism was quite different. Social media was not there and I used to subscribe to a few “e-zines” where I would find out about the latest cool website or interesting web project (at that time, my day job was web designer). Nowadays, everything has become immediate, we all know what each other are doing through Facebook, Instagram etc., but this is becoming increasingly annoying when you travel.
As you can imagine, being a photographer who travels a lot, I love documenting my travels, but there’s a limit. I will grab a quick photograph with my phone for Instagram, I will post a few images on Facebook, but when this begins to overtake the actual joy of experiencing a place because you are too busy typing on your phone or taking selfies of yourself over and over again until your lips have just the right amount of gloss, that’s when I draw the line.
The group you see in this photograph, pretty much sums up the state of tourism nowadays. All four of them were together and they had stopped on the side of the road in Iceland to take some photos. As we were watching this, it turned out into a 20 minute wait to see what happens next. They kept taking endless selfies with the horses, pursing their lips and typing all the time on their phones. They forgot to just enjoy the moment of being with these beautiful animals in the middle of a spectacular landscape. I probably couldn’t have directed this better even if I was doing this photograph as a concept!
