“The Spectacle” and My Hunt for the Perfect Photo

This morning, I watched The Spectacle (via Johannes Kuhn), a 20-minute documentary and debut by Yasmin van Dorp.

The New Yorker is presenting the film and asks Has taking the perfect photo ruined tourism? But the documentary never explicitly comments or judges. It shows us stunning views and the people who inhabit them. The rest is up to the spectator. There is almost no dialog, except the scraps of conversation between some tourists. It is almost like a 20-minute meditation and it goes well with a hot beverage and no distractions.

However, it is easy to read criticism into the shown scenes: mass tourism, hazardous behavior for wildlife and people, wasting resources on taking that one picture for the gazillionth time, fakery, doing it for social media and not for oneself, and treating travel as an opportunity to cross something of one’s bucket list without appreciating the actual moment. It’s all there and I surely have committed most of these wrongdoings in my twenties, because look what I found when I searched through my photos after recognizing one of the spots in the documentary.

View of the Lyse Fjord with blue water at the bottom, blue sky at the top, and a very small me on the right side, sitting on the edge of the Preikestolen—a rocky massif that overlooks the fjord at 600 m.
It is not even a particularly good picture. Was it worth swinging my legs 600 m above the Lyse Fjord and almost peeing myself?

Yep, that dark smudge on the right is me. On the fucking Preikestolen (Norwegian for pulpit). From the documentary! Busted!

Granted, this was taken 14 years ago when M, S, and I visited C and N in Stavanger. And there were only ten other people on the rock massif, so we did not have to line up to get this shot. Can’t help but feel caught out, though.

I want to believe that I am a different person today, with a different attitude towards photos. I like a good memory eternalized into a photo as much as the next person, but not at any price. And definitely not for show, but for me and me only; to be able to rekindle—at any point in time—a certain atmosphere or energy captured in the picture. These days, my default behavior is taking notes on what I experience and using photos as auxiliary means to support my thinking, memory, and inspiration. I still take too many pictures, but I try to be mindful about it and to radically weed out the shots from the hip once back home. The hunt for the perfect photo is over.

And so a 20-minute documentary turned into day-long musing. Well done, Yasmin.

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