Instagrammer @fleurdeforce showcases highly impractical desertwear at the Grand Canyon Instagram.com/fleurdeforce

The desert light is white, the rocks bleached of colour. We're 5,000ft above sea level on a stone plateau accessible only by helicopter. The landscape around us feels like it was forged, fully formed, by the big bang. It feels eternal in its emptiness, possessed of epic memoires, a total recall. The rock is red, orange, huge, humbling. This is the authentic sublime, a place for quiet, hushed awe, presence, desert romance.

Ahead of me, the girl looks over her shoulder in my direction. The look in her eye is playfully flirtatious. She is alive to the lines of her beauty, the way to angle her chin for maximum effect. And what an effect it is: everything about her is studiedly immaculate; her hair is carefully tousled, her eyebrows pencil-perfect. This would be the moment to say our eyes locked but they didn't for all kinds of reasons, not least the fact that she's an Instagram Influencer and was too busy taking a photo of herself with her phone.


To my right, another Influencer, a beautiful little pixie in a designer hat, is hopping with studied insouciance from rock to rock. One of her peers is taking photos, instructing her to flick her hair as she lands. It's only up close like this that you get a real sense of the extraordinary effort that goes in to the creation of these psychotically contrived, faux-spontaneous images. Which is amusing to watch as just the right amount of casualness is central to the Influencer aesthetic which aspires to a kind of auto-paparazzo feel, as if they've been snapped in a moment of artless (but really awfully pretty) contemplation as they quietly go about their astonishingly glamorous lives. This conscious inversion of the deliberate artifice of the fashion shoot is designed to convince the 'influenced' that they're getting a fly-on-the-wall perspective on how these people actually live. Which, insofar as it is true, is only true because they get all this stuff for free: clothes, holidays, cooking equipment.

All this would barely matter if the sum of its social impact was simply to send the small coterie of Influencers further down the rabbit hole of their own narcissism, but the cultural trickledown is gaining traction and already it is changing the way we travel.

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At its best, travel is about curiosity, outwardness, a search for authentic encounters with the other. Photography was once a medium that enabled this: with its premium on stopping, framing, thinking, it encouraged seeing as opposed to merely looking. Lately, however, we seem to have stopped using photography like this. We've turned the camera around, focusing not out, but in. Photography no longer encourages seeing; it simply encourages projecting, turning the world's great vistas into mere backdrops for the self.

I stand on the rock staring out. Around me everyone is posing, clicking, capturing, desperate that the moment be documented, made real by the standards of the day. Every image is an attempt to delay the inevitable, a desperate scream that says 'look on my works, ye mighty and despair'. I look out at the land, boundless and bare, and know who's winning the long game.


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