PROLEGOMENA TO THE USA
“So tell me, how’s America been treating you guys?” barked the guy hanging at the bar next to me. I turned and saw a man in his sixties, face full of wrinkles, a flashy 80’s t-shirt and a large cowboy hat that didn’t initially let me see his eyes. He was looking at me now, smiling, waiting for my response. Good question, I thought. “Well. Very well!” I promptly replied. “Everyone is very friendly and helpful here,” added Vania, my girlfriend. “Where are you guys from? You’re not from here, are you?” I turned around for a moment to look at the whole scene, perhaps to count the differences between us and the rest of the customers of this bar lost in Arizona’s desert.
Everyone else in the bar was clearly a cowboy. The boots, the hats, the faces left no doubt about who’s local and who’s not. Somehow we ended up at a true rodeo in a tiny little town in the deep southwest USA. Certainly this was the most genuine place we’d visited so far in our American road trip. The whole scene must have been pretty funny if seen from outside: here we are, a young European couple, surfers, travellers, millennials – totally out of context in the middle of a rodeo night held in front of a family-run restaurant somewhere in Arizona. I felt a bit embarrassed by my surfer look in this cowboy place I must admit. But let’s get back to our most urgent issue. The question that this guy was asking “How’s America been treating me?” I guess pretty well. I can’t complain, I thought. But there is something more I didn’t say back then to the cowboy that I would like to share now, that America is a pretty mysterious place. It does not resemble in any way the image we have inherited from the movies, the television, the Internet, or any other source of pop culture. In fact, during this whole trip I wondered what America actually is. And whether the image that is spread all over the globe fits to its narrative. Many themes popped up in my mind while casually travelling around to find some nice lakes to go WindSUP’ing. The globalisation of photography of the great outdoors. The relationship with the wilderness. The cult of the image and online social networks.
Let me start with the first one. Photography of the great outdoors. I guess we all like to look at some perfect landscape shots and fantasize about great trips to amazing destinations. But sometimes you realize that things are not as linear as that anymore. There is the great landscape, the great place to be. And then there is the great shot, the perfectly photogenic corner. The two things are not the same. We are so bombarded by all these visual stimuli that sometimes we forget the difference between the two. So many times during our trip to the southwest USA we found ourselves surrounded by hordes of tourists, wanderers and hipsters taking the same picture with the same angle while all around, no one was actually doing anything. Where was the adventure?
I guess there’s a kind of dictatorship of tastes and trends that just leads to a huge homogenization of content where all pictures start to look the same. Somehow on our trip every interesting landscape we came across seemed like a deja vu of some shots already posted on Instagram. How much does the daily dose of Internet viewed adventure images influence our whole perception of what is considered a beautiful photograph? It made me wonder about our current way of enjoying nature and the outdoors. But that’s another story.