While
touring England’s Lake District, poet Thomas Gray suffered what we might call a
selfie-induced injury. While looking more intently at the reflection of the
setting sun in his outstretched hand than at the ground beneath his feet, Gray
reports, “I fell down on my back across a dirty lane . . . but broke only my
knuckles.” In case his reader was worried, Gray adds that he “stay’d
nevertheless, & saw the sun set in all its glory.” Although Gray’s injury
took place in 1769, during the rise of the picturesque, his accident resonates
in the age of Instagram—a time when clickbait articles regularly report people
falling off cliffs, stepping into traffic, and crashing into precarious
artworks, all in pursuit of that perfectly Instagrammable moment. It is tempting to believe that we live in a
time uniquely saturated with images. And indeed, the numbers are staggering:
Instagrammers upload about 95 million photos and videos every day. A quarter of
Americans use the app, and the vast majority of them are under 40. Because
Instagram skews so much younger than Facebook or Twitter, it is where
“tastemakers” and “influencers” now live online, and where their audiences
spend hours each day making and absorbing visual content. But so much of what
seems bleeding edge may well be old hat; the trends, behaviors, and modes of
perception and living that so many op-ed columnists and TED-talk gurus
attribute to smartphones and other technological advances are rooted in the
much older aesthetic of the picturesque.
Wealthy
eighteenth-century English travelers such as Gray used technology to mediate
and pictorialize their experiences of nature just as Instagrammers today hold
up their phones and deliberate over filters. To better appreciate the
picturesque, travelers in the late 1700s were urged to use what was known as a
gray mirror or “Claude glass,” which would simplify the visual field and help
separate the subject matter from the background, much like an Instagram filter.
Artists and aesthetes would carry these tablet-sized convex mirrors with them, and
position themselves with their backs to whatever they wished to behold—the
exact move that Gray was attempting when he tumbled into a ditch. The artist
and Anglican priest William Gilpin, who is often credited with coining the term
“picturesque,” even went so far as to mount a Claude mirror in his carriage so
that, rather than looking at the actual scenery passing outside his window, he
could instead experience the landscape as a mediated, aestheticized “succession
of high-coloured pictures.”
Connections
between the Instragrammable and the picturesque go deeper than framing methods,
however. The aesthetics are also linked by shared bourgeois preoccupations with
commodification and class identity. By understanding how Instagram was
prefigured by a previous aesthetic movement—one which arose while the middle
class was first emerging—we can come closer to understanding our current
moment’s tensions between beauty, capitalism, and the pursuit of an authentic
life.
Thomas Gainsborough
Artist
with a Claude Glass (Self-Portrait?), Pencil
Today you
can still find echoes of the picturesque in travel photos on Instagram. A
friend’s recent trip to Cuba, for example, will feature leathery old men
smoking cigars among palm trees and pastel junkers. Or simply search #VanLife
to see an endless stream of vintage Volkswagens chugging through the red desert
landscape of the American Southwest. But rather than concentrate on generic
similarities between the picturesque and images one finds on Instagram, it is
more illuminating to think of how both aesthetics arose from similar
socioeconomic and class circumstances—manifesting, according to Price, as
images filled with “interesting and entertaining particulars.”
Price’s
use of the word “interesting” is significant in understanding the relationship
between the picturesque and the Instagrammable. In Our Aesthetic Categories:
Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), philosopher Sianne Ngai positions the
picturesque as a function of visual interest—of variation and compositional
unpredictability—which she connects to the enticements of capitalism. For a
scene or a picture to be interesting, she argues, it must be judged in relation
to others, one of many. According to Ngai, this picturesque habit began “emerging
in tandem with the development of markets.” Unlike beauty, which exalts, or the
sublime, which terrifies, Ngai suggests that the picturesque produces an affect
somewhere between excitement and boredom. It is a feeling tied to amusement and
connoisseurship, like letting one’s eyes wander over a series of window
displays.
And so,
too, is the Instagrammable, a mode that is inseparable from listless scrolling.
The pleasure comes when your eyes alight on that special something, which seems
to pop out from the rest. This twinning of artistic and mercantile rapture is
best encapsulated by a remark that a young Walpole made to Gray when the two
were touring Europe for the first time: “I would buy the Colosseum if I could.”
Likewise, there is no point in putting anything on Instragram that is not, in
some sense, for sale—even if what is for sale is an abstract possibility
unlocked through class belonging.
If we
allow that the rise of the picturesque was in part a product of England’s
material circumstances in the eighteenth century, then it follows that our own
tumultuous economic and technological moment has helped produce the
Instagrammable. Broadly speaking, I am talking about neoliberalism, defined by
David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) as “a theory of
political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an
institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free
markets, and free trade . . . which seeks to bring all human action into the
domain of the market.”
The
picturesque was ultimately about situating oneself within the class structure
by demonstrating a heightened aesthetic appreciation of the natural world,
during a period when land was becoming increasingly commodified. By contrast,
the Instagrammable is a product of the neoliberal turn toward the individual.
It is therefore chiefly concerned with bringing previously non-commodifiable
aspects of the self into the marketplace by turning leisure and lifestyle into
labor and goods. Though the two aesthetics share a similar image-making
methodology and prize notions of authenticity, the Instagrammable is perhaps
even more capacious than its predecessor. Through the alchemy of social media,
everything you post, whether it is a self-portrait or not, is transformed into
a monetized datapoint and becomes an exercise in personal branding.
Imagine
the scene: the rural, wild Lake District became a favorite destination for
travelers wielding tinted mirrors and guidebooks, full of tips on improving the
neighborhood. It was only a matter of time before they became the butt of jokes
by everyone from Jane Austen to William Wordsworth.
Some lines
could be pulled fresh from a modern-day critique of Instagram-obsessed
travelers. In the 1798 comic opera The Lakers, tourist Beccabunga Veronique is
hard at work on a painting that corrects the flaws of the Lake District’s
all-too-real landscape. “If it is not like what it is,” she said, “it is like
what it ought to be. I have only made it picturesque.”
Wordsworth,
a shade-throwing resident of the Lake District, entitled one poem “On Seeing
Some Tourists of the Lakes Pass By Reading; a Practice Very Common,” then
griped at the distracted visitors: “For this came ye hither? is this your
delight?” He frequently complained about the mindless tourists that crowded his
favorite spots, and rolled his literary eyes about the use of Claude glasses.
And in
1812, Claude glasses and picturesque travel took a satirical death blow when
writer William Combe published The Tour of Doctor Syntax: in search of the
picturesque, a parody poem lampooning affected, pretentious tourists. Like William
Gilpin and Thomas Gray, Doctor Syntax risked everything for a good view and an
impressive story—falling in lakes, getting treed by bulls, and being thrown
from horses along the way.
“I’ll make
a tour—and then I’ll write it. You know well what my pen can do,” said Doctor
Syntax to his wife as he set out to get rich and become a travel influencer.
“I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there, And picturesque it everywhere.” Or as
a 21st-century Doctor Syntax would put it: #travel #blessed #picturesque.
Popular in
the 18th century, the Claude glass was a mirror that took the scene behind you
and transformed it into something different, much like the filters in Instagram
or Hipstamatic promise to do. The Claude glass was a sort of early pocket lens
without the camera and it was held aloft to observe a vista over one’s
shoulder. The technology was simple: A blackened mirror reduced the tonal
values of its reflected landscape, and a slightly convex shape pushed more
scenery into a single focal point, reducing a larger vista into a tidy
snapshot.
The Claude
glass is named for Claude Lorrain, a 17th-century landscape painter, whose name
in the late 18th century became synonymous with the picturesque aesthetic,
although there is no indication he used or knew of it or anything similar. The
Claude glass was supposed to help artists produce works of art similar to those
of Lorrain. William Gilpin, the inventor of the picturesque ideal, advocated
the use of a Claude glass saying, "they give the object of nature a soft,
mellow tinge like the colouring of that Master". Gilpin mounted a mirror
in his carriage, from where he could take in "a succession of
high-coloured pictures ... continually gliding before the eye".
Claude
glasses were widely used by tourists and amateur artists, who quickly became
the targets of satire. Hugh Sykes Davies (1909 – 1984) observed their facing
away from the object they wished to paint, commenting, "It is very typical
of their attitude to Nature that such a position should be desirable."
Also of interest :
How Instagram is changing the way we design cultural spaces : As neighborhoods, restaurants and museums become more photogenic, are we experiencing an “Instagramization” of the world? by Emily Matchar
Some say the Instagramization of the world is leading to a troubling homogeneity. Art and design writer Kyle Chayka suggests social media is spreading a generic hipster aesthetic across the globe. You can travel from London to Los Angeles to Hong Kong and find coffee shops, hotels and offices with the same Instagram-friendly reclaimed wood, industrial lighting, white walls and “pops” of color.
