Saturday, January 20, 2018

The Instagrammable Charm of the Bourgeoisie

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. (...)

While the word “picturesque” came into circulation in the early 1700s to describe anything that looked “like a picture,” it solidified into a stable aesthetic by the late 1700s, when travelers began recording their trips through Europe and England with sketches, etchings, and the occasional painting. The method for circulating their images was more cumbersome than ours, but largely followed the same formula as today. A wealthy traveler trained in draftsmanship (whom we would now call an influencer) would take a months-long journey, carrying art supplies to record picturesque scenes. When he returned home, these images were turned into etchings, which could then be mass-produced, sold individually or bound together to create a record of his travels for his friends and family to peruse.

This practice had its roots in the Grand Tour, a rite of passage for young male aristocrats entering government and diplomacy, in which they roamed the continent for a few years with the aim of accruing gentlemanly knowledge of the world. But the picturesque travelers of the late eighteenth century were a new type of tourist, men and women born during a period of rapid economic and social change. This was the world of Jane Austen, in which a burgeoning middle class sought to solidify and improve its position in English society by adopting practices that signaled prosperity and refinement. (...)

For Gilpin, the picturesque was not just an aesthetic, but a mindset that projected compositional principles onto a landscape while constantly comparing that landscape against previous trips and pictures, a kind of window-shopping of the soul. But the direct experience of picturesque nature is really secondary to having recorded it, either on paper or in memory. “There may be more pleasure in recollecting, and recording,” he writes, “from a few transient lines, the scenes we have admired, than in the present enjoyment of them.” Only recently catching up with the insights of our forebears, the pleasures of recording and archiving have been rediscovered by digital media theorists, such as Nathan Jurgenson, who calls this preoccupation “nostalgia for the present.” Typically, this condition is associated with photographic image-making, and especially with digital technology, but these preoccupations obviously preceded the advent of the camera. (...)

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. (...)

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.

It almost goes without saying the selfie is by far the most popular kind of image on Instagram. Photos of faces receive 38 percent more engagement than other kinds of content. Indeed, one could argue that all images on the platform are imbued with the selfie’s metaphysical logic: I was here, this is me. Following this structure, mirrors and shiny surfaces on Instagram abound, with the photographer reflected in still ponds, shop windows, and Anish Kapoor sculptures. Sometimes a body part or an inanimate object will stand in for the self: fingers cradling a puppy, hot-dog legs by the beach, a doll in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Other times, the presence of the Instagrammer is suggested through a shadow cast against a scenic backdrop, or merely implied by the very existence of the photograph itself, which says, This was an Instagrammable moment I recorded. Although rarely figural, picturesque images could also be said to have possessed the qualities of the selfie avant la lettre, given what they were often meant to signal: I went here, I am the kind of person who has traveled and decorates my home with this kind of art.

This all-encompassing logic of the selfie clarifies itself when you type “#Instagrammable” into the platform’s search bar. Foamy lattes, tourist selfies, old jeeps, women in teeny bikinis, and the phrase “namaste bitches” written in neon lights. On first glance, these photos seem to share nothing but a hashtag, yet when taken together, they represent an emergent worldview. Whereas British travelers of the picturesque era set their newly trained gazes upon rugged vistas and ruined abbeys and then recreated them on their own properties, Instagrammers are instead retooling their own lives—the most obvious medium of our neoliberal age. In short, the project of the Instagrammer is not to find interesting things to photograph, but to become the interesting thing.

At its core, Instagram is powered by a careful balance of desire: every commodity (including the Instagrammer) must be desirable to the consumer, but no consumer can seem unsettled by desire for the commodity. Like the measured interest at the core of the picturesque—a display of world-wise connoisseurship that signaled class belonging—“thirst,” and its careful suppression, is what drives Instagram. Thirst is an affect that combines envy, erotic desire, and visual attention. However, if you are obviously thirsty, it means that your persona as a sanguine consumer has slipped, which is considered bad or embarrassing. One has revealed too much about one’s real desires. In this way, Instagram influencers are like dandies, whose greatest accomplishment was the control of their emotions, and more importantly control over the ways their faces and bodies performed those emotions. “It is the joy of astonishing others,” writes Charles Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life (1863), but “never oneself being astonished.” (...)

It is this obsession with looking natural that appeals to advertisers, because unlike a magazine ad or television commercial, the line on Instagram between the real and the make-believe is much more porous. People scroll for hours on their phones because of the pictures’ ability to simultaneously conjure fantasy and ground that fantasy in the suggestion of documented experience. Contemporary audiences know that television ads are fake, but on an Instagram feed, mixed with family snapshots and close-ups of birthday parties, sponsored posts of cerulean waters on the shores of Greece look real enough—achievable, or at a minimum, something one should hope to achieve.

by Daniel Penny, Boston Review |  Read more:
Image: Getty