The world is not our backdrop.

One morning, peak pandemic, I’m sitting on the beach at El Matador at 6am. Malibu’s most beautiful, picturesque beach is hugged by a giant cliff and peppered with spectacular rock formations with caves large enough you can walk through them. If you arrive at this hour you can burrow into your choice cave along the bottom of the cliff and have a moment alone with the ocean before the crowd hits. It’s a morning routine I prescribe whenever I feel the need to be ripped from the self-absorbed context of my own life. These rocks and waves, after all, have billions of years on me. They don’t move for me, they don’t stop for me, and it’s a humbling reminder that the world doesn't revolve around me. Which is weird, because a lot of the time it feels like it does. I think this is a very human notion, but one that lately feels supercharged by modernity’s conveniences, and also the ease with which the internet has allowed us to package up our personalities and project them onto an infinitely attentive, potentially monetizable, largely unknown audience. I felt that shift pretty clearly on this morning at El Matador.

Not long after I arrived at the beach, a man and a woman did too. He was equipped with a Canon 6D and she was equipped with several bikinis. They moved back and forth across my eyeline over, and over, and over again like a Boomerang. She’d stretch her arms into the air and do a formulaic spin, turn back and do the whole thing over. Next came three attractive twenty-somethings wearing matching silk lilac mini dresses. They didn’t have a pro camera, but each held firmly onto her iPhone in one hand, and oddly enough for this hour, canned rosé in the other. They’d take turns playing photographer and girl-prancing-in-water, and then crowd around the iPhone to inspect each shot. Then a woman in a long flowing bohemian skirt and matching crop top arrives at the beach. A photographer snaps her spinning in circles for almost an hour before she makes her way into the water, fully clothed. They capture each progressing moment she slowly soaks herself, until she gets sand stuck to her entire, wet, fully clothed body. It looks uncomfortable. They leave.

Things officially get distracting when two beach-goers arrive with an extra large cardboard box and set up camp a few yards in front of me. They immediately start bumping house music and then set up their video camera on a tripod. One pulls out a roll of toilet paper, steps in front of the camera, and begins dancing exuberantly with this highly coveted sanitary item, pumping it up, and down and around her body. Cut. Again. Cut. Again. Cut. As soon as I believe the duo has their shot, they pull out a giant dolphin costume, put it on, and do the whole thing over again several times. They’re so busy getting the shot – in fact everyone on the beach is so busy getting the shot – that not one of them notices a real live family of dolphins swimming rather majestically in their backdrop – formerly known, as the ocean.

Full disclosure – I have been this person at this beach. I used to work as a photographer. My mom was a photographer. I grew up surrounded by her images and in her images. I love photos. Films. Documentaries. Art. Memories. Especially cheesy family photo albums. I love stories and beauty and life and the people who are somehow able to capture this all in a way that’s truly moving. But my relationship to all of this, in the year 2022, is precarious. I think, as human beings, part of the reason we first fell in love with photography was because we valued the fleeting beauty of life and thought, wow, someone needs to capture this! And for a while, technology naturally limited our ability to do so. But now, the ability to capture life’s fleeting beauty is in all of our pockets. We can do so with such efficiency – and at such a large scale – that the world no longer needs people to capture life’s fleeting beauty. We need people to just sit back and experience it.

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I learned recently about a social media app called Scout. Basically, you scroll through a feed and when you see a “cute aesthetic place” you’d like to use for your “background,” you can pay a small fee to acquire the exact coordinates from where the photo was taken. The Zoe Report said it’s “the new travel app taking the work out of scouting Instagrammable locations.” But I wonder if it’s fair to call it a “travel app” when the main purpose of the app is not to help you see the world, but rather, see yourself in front of it. “Find this neutral city background to complement your feed” is the caption on one @justscoutit Instagram photo, which shows a woman who I’m to believe has been caught reading as she leans dubiously against a city building in Portland, Oregon. Again, I wonder what sort of travel app encourages you to find value in a city building only in its aesthetic relationship to your own Instagram feed. 

In a launch video, Scout shows a trio of girls in a cool car by the beach. With the ocean framed beautifully in their backdrop, they all stare into a phone, and a tagline appears overtop – “stop searching, start scrolling” – a premise which seems to center on the idea that exploring the world has become an arduous, pointless search we now wish to avoid. Or at least, we should streamline the process in a way that allows us to skip over anything that doesn’t align with our personal aesthetic vision.

To be clear, this app was created by an influencer who earns at least part of her living through lifestyle content creation, and an app like this would help someone in that position get their work done faster. It also gives people a chance to monetize their content – every time someone “unlocks their location” they get paid – which is great for them, but what about everyone else? How do we feel about the fact that the most beautiful corners of the earth are being digitized and sold – not as experiences, but as photo ops? That’s the weird thing about lifestyle content – I wonder, is it encouraging us to live better lives? Or is it turning content creation into a lifestyle? Am I being influenced to read a book? Or am I being influenced to take a picture of myself reading a book? I think that a person can do both of these things – have an experience and take a picture of it – I just often look around and truly have to wonder what the priority has become, and how technology has influenced those priorities.

What we need from tech, now more than ever, is for it to help us look up from our phones, to get offline, to get out of ourselves, and into the moment. We need tech that encourages our individuality and self-exploration, not tech that helps us mimic each other (cc: @shitbloggerspost). So my hope for any app is that people not only find it useful, but also find that it encourages a considerate approach to the living, breathing world around them. And I do know many people who take this approach while capturing content – even when it’s their job to do so. They use their judgment when it comes to when they capture content and how. For example, am I aware of my surroundings? Is this infringing on someone else’s experience of the world? Has the number of shots I’ve taken become excessive? Am I putting my shot above someone else’s real-time enjoyment? Or even safety? Last week I stopped my car in the middle of the street I live on to wait for two people to get their shot, only to end up watching one of them walk backward and knock a guy off his bike.

“…am I aware of my surroundings? Is this infringing on someone else’s experience of the world? Has the number of shots I’ve taken become excessive? Am I putting my shot above someone else’s real-time enjoyment? Or even safety?”

I guess my neighborhood is one of the reasons I’m particularly angsty about this topic. I live on a street with an industrial “aesthetic” and its soft gray hues must work well for a lot of people’s Instagram feeds, because I encounter these small photoshoots constantly. When the sun is in a certain spot, the windows on my ground floor apartment become reflective and people sometimes use it as a mirror between shots. They look at themselves, and they don’t see, or even seem to consider, the person who lives inside. So when I say I hope for people to have “a considerate approach” to the world, what I’m saying is that when you travel to a place with the intention of photographing yourself in it, please remember that people live and work in this “location” and they don’t see it as a backdrop. They see their homes, their neighbors, their memories and their lives. It has an energetic pulse and, to me, one of the most interesting parts about traveling is trying to get in sync with that pulse. It’s different from my own, it has unique needs and unfamiliar taste, but, that’s the point – to remove myself from the foreground and see what things feel like from a different position.

I live and work amongst creatives and I truly see the internet, and the content we create for it, as being an invaluable asset in modern creative life. I’m also a creative director, so I personally find myself impositioning the world for my shot somewhat frequently. This is a part of life that isn’t going away and it doesn’t even need to. In fact it’s often quite fun – both creating content and consuming it. All I would like to argue for here, is that we use discretion. That, while we create our content out in the world, we show respect for those who are trying to actually live in it. That we acknowledge our contribution to the energetic pulse of the places we travel to. To agree that it’s way more fun to be at a restaurant where the people next to you are laughing and engrossed in conversation, than next to a table of people taking flash photos of their food, editing them, and then rearranging the table to do the whole thing over again. I’m trying to say that it’s more fun to spot a family of dolphins in the ocean than it is to spot them in the background of your photo. I’m asking that we value the moment, and that we value life, more than we value lifestyle content.