On Selfies and Shutterbugs

A Love Story in 12,000,000 Pixels

As relentless selfie-takers, we have to acknowledge that there is no more narcissistic activity in the human experience. However, unlike friends of ours who take the exact same photograph no matter where in the world they find themselves, we at least try to include something of interest in the photo frame.

A church, an Eiffel Tower, a riot, an ice cream cone, a cityscape, a handsome waiter, a pretty tree—a car ferry ramp?—whatever. But it really doesn’t matter, because—and let’s be honest here—the only object of timeless, historical interest is the cute couple struggling for position and politely snarling at each other to don the trademark plastic smile that makes such photos so… memorable?

[And before we get to our main point, a minor digression: If you’re a couple of long standing who continue to enjoy each other’s company, is it still a selfie when one of you photographs the other in front of every unforgettable scene of your trip? If so, we might need remedial selfie therapy worse than we thought.]

Our main point being: Travel photography has changed so much over the last three decades, that nowadays, we hardly recognize the craft. And it’s all about that astonishing iPhone revolution in your hand or at the end of your selfie stick.

When we first got into the commercial photography business, we’d sell one of our unique, quirky shots of Notre Dame or the Roman Colosseum for a minimum $3,000. Then overnight, thanks to Shutterstock and such, magazines started paying $2.50 to the cell phone user standing behind us and “borrowing” our clever perspective. A huge difference in quality, of course, but not a vast enough gulf that a magazine editor couldn’t bridge it with an intern’s login to Photoshop.

And then, when readers switched from magazines to the internet for travel inspiration, the market for high-quality travel photographs vanished altogether. After all, there wasn’t a device in the world that couldn’t manage a few million pixels of sRGB at 96 dots per inch.

So nowadays, we’re out of the commercial photography business and forced to come up with an interesting thought here and there to scribble alongside our photos. But for all of our friends fumbling with their selfie sticks and punching the upload button on their phones, we do have one plea:

At least try to make it interesting.

Don’t subject everyone in your Friends list to the “How we spent our summer vacation” slideshow your parents used to roll out every September. Because no one will ever love that gorgeous selfie as much as the selvies who took it.

And if you ever glance around and start to cringe with embarrassment, that’s probably a clue that you picked the wrong time to pull out your phone and stick:

• At a funeral, in the middle of a church service, on the Haj to Mecca, or on a visit to a concentration camp. Maybe as the plane’s oxygen masks drop, or your cruise ship calls for the lifeboats.

• We could also generally add Versailles, Wimbledon, Carnival in Rio, the Kentucky Derby, Disneyland, the Taj Mahal, and 1,195 Japanese train stations.

• Not to mention the legal (and physical!) perils of selfie-taking while running with bulls (Pamplona), hugging a zoo tiger (New York), or dancing with a bear (California)—all illegal and punishable by God knows what horrible fines.

Obviously, if you’re writing an article like this one and bemoaning the tacky overuse of selfies, you need to display a handful of samples from your own collection. But strictly for evidentiary purposes, and not to indulge some deep-seated, low-self-esteem desire to draw attention to yourself. Oh no, we’d never do that.

Naturally, there’s a time and place for documenting your travels, and not just so you can prove you climbed off the couch and shelved the remote. For example, we recently found this gallery of photos from a trip we took a few years back to Corsica with our great friends Amanda and Nico.

Inspired by the brilliant French movie Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulaine (Amélie in the English version)—where the heroine sends back a postcard of her father’s favorite garden gnome snapped in locations from Rome to New York to Angkor Wat—we took photos of Glinda Snapping Friends all over the island.

See what we mean? At least the thought was there. And such a cute, photogenic—and co-operative!—couple. Maybe we’ll send them a selfie-stick for Christmas.