The Selfies of Hamburg

Too much happens in a trip to fit into a one measly Substack. Hence the Outtake, with random memories and bonus philosophizing

May 12, 2024

Early in my trip to Hamburg, I came across this scene:

That blackened structure you see in the background are the ruins of St Nicholas church.

For one relatively brief, shining moment, St Nicholas was the tallest building in the world. Founded late in the 12th century, the medieval church burnt to the ground in 1842, in the great fire of Hamburg. A couple of decades later, the city began rebuilding it, and when the reconstruction was complete in 1874, St Nicholas’ new, 147-meter spire smashed the world’s previous height record, held until then by the cathedral of Strasbourg. (Two years later, Rouen’s new cathedral would snatch the title from Hamburg, only to lose it, in 1880, to the cathedral of Cologne. I’m not saying that this architectural big-dick rivalry contributed to the outbreak of Franco-Prussian hostilities in 1870, but I’m not not saying it either. There are many means of conducting a war.)

Anyway. Even without the record, St Nicholas was still pretty darn tall, which is why, when World War Two rolled around, American and British pilots used it as an orientation marker for their bombing raids. During the last week of July 1943, Allied forces launched against Hamburg what was then the heaviest aerial assault in history. Operation Gomorrah killed 37,000 people, and destroyed over 60% of the city’s housing; it also reduced most of St Nicholas to rubble. But the spire somehow survived, and after the war, instead of rebuilding, the city decided to leave the burned-out shell as a memorial to those killed, and a monument against war.

It is not, in other words, the first place that springs to mind for a selfie.

And yet, there she was. The tourist in her striped yellow top, sunglasses firmly in place, casually draping her jacket first over one shoulder, then the other. Her friends watched patiently as she struck pose after pose for her boyfriend’s camera.

No one else seemed to notice. No one ever notices these days, so familiar has the sight become of a tourist using a landmark as backdrop for a personal modeling session. Except for the occasional scandal sparked when a selfie session rubs up against a still-extant sense of propriety–when a tourist unzips a protective suit to reveal her g-string in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, say, or poses wistfully on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz—these individualized photo shoots have become an inherent part of travel. For some, they are the entire point of travel.

I clearly remember the first time I saw one of these selfie tourists. I was in Barcelona , walking uptown on a sunny spring morning from my hotel near the Ciutadella Park. As I approached the Arc de Triomf, I noticed a young woman posing in front of the monument. She was quite stylishly dressed, and at first I thought she must be a model on a fashion shoot. But as I got closer, I could see that the photographer had no camera beyond his phone and that the woman was actually barking orders at him, rather than the other way around. Watching her strike one pose after the next, I was astonished by how utterly unmortified she seemed, mugging obliviously for the camera as streams of passersby veered peevishly around her.

A month or so later, I was in Ibiza to review some hotels, and it happened again. The resort had lined its section of beach with lounge chairs, and although it was still early in the day, all three rows of them were full. Down at the water’s edge, and apparently oblivious to all of us watching, a young woman in a bikini posed extravagantly while a young man snapped photos of her. She made fake little splashes in slow motion; she lay down and arched her back to let the waves wash over her breasts; she rolled in the surf and smiled coquettishly. I wasn’t the only one staring, believe you me.

In both cases, I was floored by the women’s utter lack of self-consciousness. For me, either one of those situations would have been roughly equivalent, in terms of shame and other emotional tortures, to performing naked gymnastics in front of a packed house at Madison Square Garden. Yet neither of those women, nor any of the selfie takers I would encounter in the future—not the ones blocking foot traffic on the Charles Bridge as they posed in their wedding clothes; nor the ones holding up the line at Shake Shack while they squeezed their hot burgers lasciviously between manicured nails; nor the ones dancing to music only they could hear in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor— seem the least bit embarrassed. So much so that I often found myself wondering if these selfie tourists had admirably tapped into a deep and sustaining well of self-confidence, or if they were just stone cold psychopaths.

Narcissism is of course one obvious explanation for the transformation of travel into a series of selfie opportunities, and some researchers have pointed to a correlation between the rise in narcissistic behavior and the prevalence of what they refer to as the “selfie tourist gaze.” Others see it more benignly, as part of a general trend, especially among young people, of identity-building and presentation; in this view, the tourist selfie is one more healthy means of articulating who one is, and connecting, via social media, to others.

Luckily, we have Susan Sontag to help us sort it out. Her collection of essays, On Photography, was published in the 1970s, before social media even existed. But her central claim, that photography has reframed the world and our place in it, seems more relevant than ever.

For one, she pointed out how traveling itself had become a means primarily for collecting photographs. Photography and tourism developed in tandem with each other, and their trajectories are so mutually intertwined that it now feels unnatural to travel without a camera. This is in part, Sontag observed, because photography gives tourists something to do. Especially for cultures that prize work (and here she called out especially the US and Japan), the act of photographing a place fills–and even becomes– the experience of being in a place.

It also demonstrates that the journey took place. Since its invention in the 19th-century, photography has always been perceived as an accurate reflection of reality, in a way that painting and other visual representations are not. Even today when we are aware of just how easy it is to manipulate, a photograph still carries extra authority; it counts as evidence. In the case of tourist images, that proof establishes the veracity of the trip. It says, in essence, See? I really was there.

Sontag died in 2004, before selfies became a thing. But her points seem even more true of them than of ‘normal’ tourist pics. If taking a photo of oneself in various locations has become as integral a part of the travel experience as figuring out train schedules and queuing for gelato, it is in part because selfie-production goes even further toward reducing the anxiety of arriving in a place and having nothing to do. A blurry snap of the Eiffel Tower or a stiffly posed photo of the family lined up awkwardly at the lip of the Grand Canyon may buy you a moment’s respite, but it’s nothing like the work involved in properly framing your body in relation to the backdrop behind you, positioning your ring light, and choosing the pose and outfit and filters that show you at your most attractive. (It is perhaps no coincidence that some research suggests taking photos for the purpose of sharing them on social media, versus as a memento, tends to reduce the pleasure of the experience itself.)

The other part of the equation that Sontag identifies is heightened too. Even more than the landscape or monument photo, the selfie acts as proof, making its evidence of presence all the more irrefutable by subtly changing the verb tense, from I was there to I am there. The grammatical emphasis is different too. If before it was on the prepositional phrase— I am at the Colosseum, I am standing on the Great Wall, I am eating mole in Oaxaca—now it is on the subject. I, I, I.

Right before she introduces the notion that tourism and photography developed in relationship to each other, Sontag discusses another key purpose of photography, the commemoration of important moments of family life, like weddings, baptisms, and bar mitzvahs. In fact, photography became a rite of family life, she notes, at precisely the same moment when that family was “undergoing radical surgery,” with the core nuclear family carved off from the extended one that had previously sustained it throughout history. “Photography came along,” she writes, “to memorialize the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life.”

If photographs–those ghostly traces of dispersed relatives, as Sontag describes them—served as a balm on the anxiety produced by a novel social structure, I wonder if the same might not be true of the selfie. Only in this case, perhaps the thing under threat is not connection to one’s extended family but to one’s identity as a whole. If you have grown up encouraged to think of yourself—your body, your tastes, your opinions— as a brand and your most valuable asset as your attention span, you might feel the need to assert your existence as well.

In this version, the grand old castle, the sunset over Machu Picchu, the burned out church-turned-memorial to a war that killed millions–these are no longer their own realities, but accessories to the self, like an outfit you put on. There’s something terrifying about that idea, and maybe enraging as well. But there’s also something sad about it, even moving. I still get annoyed by selfie tourists, but now, when I think about the girl posing in front of St Nicholas, or even that one prancing on the beach in Ibiza, my annoyance is tempered by something like recognition. For who among us–even the ‘us’ that grew up before social media–has not at one time or another felt the need to assert our existence, to prove I am here?

The Unplugged Traveler

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