Our Obsession With Photography And Fear of The Sublime

This is another post for paid subscribers with bits of research and further readings that don’t make it into free posts. Thank you for your support and the time you’re granting me to go down these rabbit holes!

The story started with me wandering through an art gallery alone when I was seventeen. Like any teenager with his usual angst, I was reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche religiously while secretly devising a plan to escape high school, smoke a cigarette in the parking lot and then odd-job around to make a living.

Almost everything grates a seventeen-year-old’s nerves, and one particularly annoyed me in the gallery. I saw waves of people taking photographs, not of paintings, but of themselves in front of paintings.

Five years later, after surviving high school and a B.A. in English, I found myself in Paris walking among landmarks my seventeen-year-old self would’ve sold his kidneys to see. Jardin des Plantes, Musée Rodin and Hôtel des Invalides just to name a few. Again, I saw the same wave of people taking photographs: not of the landmarks, but of themselves in front of them.

Maybe five years of life evened out my temper a little. I wasn’t annoyed but curious. I brought up this point with a local, André, to get his two cents, and in his typical Parisian manner, he said: