the pandemic and landscape photography | part i

5am. Alarm goes off.

"Goddamn, it’s early.”

I roll over in bed and look out the window. Clouds. Glow. Hints of light. I poke Tung to wake him up.

“It’s glowing. Let’s go for it.”

We scramble to gather our gear, then close the door to our rorbu and speed down the E10 to our favorite mountain. We get out, shake hands with a few other photographers at the overlook, and start hiking up the hillside. The light continues to get better and better. We finally reach the summit, and the sky blows up and w—

Grrrr. I was daydreaming again, wasn’t I?

Yeah, must have been. Happens a lot when you’re quarantined. In a span of 3 months, millions of landscape artists around the world went from traveling everywhere, to traveling nowhere.

Most of us had trips planned. All cancelled. Back home, many parks are closed. Long-distance travel is discouraged; in some places, it’s banned.

For many photographers, shooting is a social activity. It involves meeting others, experiencing nature’s best together, networking, dinners together, solidarity. No longer so.

Some of us have been exploring more locally, given the clear air and no traffic. But many of us are staying at home.

It stands to reason that, stay-at-home orders would lead to more time processing, more time engaging with each other on social media. It would be Instagram time. Escaype networking time. Flickr time. Photoshop time. We should be seeing more new images being released than ever before.

But none of that appears to have happened. Photography posting and engagement are NOT up. Early data may indicate that some social media engagement among photographers may actually be falling. (In Escaype, activity is roughly constant; excluding virus talk, it is down.)

Let’s make sure we understand this. We’re finally at home. We finally have plenty of free time to process our work, and engage with others’ images online. But many of us are choosing not to.

Much of modern landscape art has become tied to long-distance travel. Inspired by images we find on social media, we chase the most epic scenes we can find around the world. Hawaii. New Zealand. Dolomites. Patagonia. Southwest. Norway. Road trips and international flights yield the goods. In doing so, we overlook our local scenes. We skip exploring our backyard to spend that time researching our next big trip.

Even back home, we act similarly. We ignore the miles of amazing fog while driving to Mt. Tamalpais. We skip a local scouting hike to get to Martin’s Beach in time for sunset.

But suddenly, the global travel industry came crashing down. And dragged much of modern social media-based landscape photography down with it.

When things start to open up again, open international travel may well be one of the very last things to fully re-emerge — if it ever does.

Looking to the future, with climate change set to threaten our civilization far more than any pandemic in recent history, and demanding at least as stringent, long-term “stay home, stay local” measures, the return to “normal” travel might be short-lived — if it happens at all.

What about the declining social media landscape photography lifestyle? Will that survive the pandemic? Will it survive climate change?

While some of us have chosen to shift our focus to shooting locally, many of us are letting the camera collect dust while we take up other hobbies at home. We’re baking. We’re writing, gardening, cooking. We’re staying at home. We’re living more…simply. Perhaps that means we should adapt to shooting more simply.

Thankfully, we in Escaype live in some of the most photogenic locations in the world. The possibilities here in our backyard are nearly endless.

Time to take better advantage of them, perhaps?