Ever since I read Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ and watched Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’, I’ve thought of writing an article on that addressed faciality on social media, which is what Burnham does, in his own way, during the segment on ‘A White Woman’s Instagram’. Then came the summer of 2025 and I noticed that I don’t have to do that. Someone beat me to it, albeit in their own way. I could still do that, okay, but it’s kind of pointless.
So, Niklas Toresson addresses this in his recent article ‘Landscape constructions on Instagram: A postmodern reinvention of romanticism’. So, to summarize the article, which is easily accessible, do go and read it, people are in the habit of taking certain kinds of photos when they travel and this can be seen by assessing people’s Instagram content.
Now, I guess you could say that it’s obvious, sure, but it’s not like there’s too many extensive analyses on this. What I particularly like about this article is that it is largely quantitative. Toresson has put in the effort and gone through 600 photos and analyzed them, one by one, to see if certain patterns emerge. He did also conduct interviews, so there’s that, but I wanted to emphasize the work that went into that analysis.
You might also point out that opting for the quantitative route lacks in detail then. Well, yes, to a certain degree that’ll be true when you read his article, or any article that is at least partly quantitative, because the point with patterns is that you focus on certain things that apply to everything you’re analyzing. Oh, and you can still do a really good job, focusing on many aspects in the data.
People also tend to forget that quantitative analyses are not just counting things. To focus on this and/or that aspect, whatever it or they may be, you need a solid background in whatever you are focusing on. For example, in his case, the similarities pertain to how Instagram influencers are in the habit of posting idealized and romanticized photos of landscapes. To figure that out, it’s not as simple as looking at photos and seeing that this is the case. No, you need to know about the motifs and strategies employed by Romantic era painters and, well, that’s not a given.
I guess you could also state that people like pretty things, instead of ugly things. Okay, you got me there, that’s fair enough, but, again, it’s one thing to point that out and another thing to explain why that is. Plus, you also need to be able to explain what counts as beautiful and what counts as ugly. I’d say that people may find beauty in ugliness, which is something that he points out in the abstract already, how ruination can be thought of as beauty. This is something that he comments on in the discussion, noting that whatever is left of a previous, pre-industrial era is valorized.
David Lowenthal expresses this perfectly in ‘The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History’, as I’ve pointed out in the past, when he (88) states that:
“[I]n a heritage landscape it never rains[.]”
Only to add that by what he (88) means by rain is a feature is thought of as non-ideal:
“[E]xcept for desert-dwelling Navajo Indians, for whom ‘back then everything was in harmony and it rained all the time[.]’”
The point here is that rain is, of course, good when you live in conditions where it rarely rains, whereas it is bad when you live in conditions where it rains or, rather, seems to rain all the time. In other words, it’s all sunshine an rainbows, one way or another, even though it is we who remember that, ah, back in the day everything was better, like the grass was greener, the skies were bluer, flowers were aplenty etc.
Anyway, I’m skipping all the necessary reading that I’m sure you can familiarize yourself with if you aren’t already familiar with the social construction of landscape, how that is connected to gaze as a certain way of seeing the world and then depicting it in stereotypical ways, like according to set templates that have become valorized, and Romanticism that a thing in painting and subsequently in photography in the 19th century, as well as in the early 20th century. I’ll just comment on the results.
So, as you might expect, the results indicate a sharp distinction between humanity and nature. The latter is depicted offering solitude to former, while also being sublime, which, in short, is this in-awe kind of beauty, like when you are confronted with a tall mountain range.
This distinction is emphasized by selectively leaving people outside the frame. This is an important point discussed by Toresson, because this makes world appear more desolate. It’s worth emphasizing here because it’s not considered manipulating a photo. People have the impression that photos are the truth and, conversely, doing something with them is altering the truth. What they fail to understand is that you don’t actually take a photo, even though that is how it gets reported, also by me, out of habit, but rather make a photo. It is you, the photographer, who frames the view, what gets included in the frame and thus also what gets excluded from the view. You can certainly remove something from a photo in post-processing, it’s fairly easy. That’s often considered unethical, but somehow leaving something outside the frame isn’t. They are the same thing, just done differently, yet you are led to believe that they aren’t.
You also define how objects appear in the frame in relation to one another, for example closer or more distant, simply by altering the focal length. Then there’s the exposure, the colors and the contrast. Was it this bright, or this dark? What were the true colors? Was it this contrasty, or more muddled? Now, even if you skip all this, perhaps because you consider it unethical to edit photos, you are still doing it, because your camera does it for you. There is no true or neutral profile in cameras. You may have some default profile, but even that has settings that are as edited as the settings on other profiles. If you think that film is neutral, well, it just isn’t. There are different kinds of films that not only have different light sensitivities, but also different color renditions.
It’s also worth noting here that there are differences in vision. Not everyone sees the world exactly the same way for the simple reason that while we are all alike, we are nonetheless different, to this and/or that extent, and that also applies to our eyes. For example, there are a lot of differences in visual acuity, i.e. the clarity of vision, and how colors are perceived.
Then there’s how we actually see, how it isn’t this rectangular, corner to corner sharp view. That field of view is really wide and tall, that’s for sure, but we can only ever see a very tiny area crisp clear in that field of view. It’s possible to render photos like that and once you lock into the focal point, it’s all good. It all looks the way it should. That said, you don’t want to stray from that point, otherwise it does not look the way it should. So, when you think of it, cameras are interesting because they can not only create a sense of depth, just like our eyes, but that they can also create this corner-to-corner sharpness that allows one’s gaze to wander in that depth, like in a virtual space.
If you want a good example of that, take a landscape photo. It can be your living room. You don’t have to go outside. You can also take a portrait photo of someone. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is looking at that photo on a screen after taking the photo. What do you think? Does it look the way that indoor or outdoor scene or that face looked when you took the photo? What was the lighting like? Was the tone a bit warmer or, perhaps, a bit colder? Was it that bright or was there less light? Was it that contrasty or, perhaps, less contrasty? Was it sharper, crispier or softer, hazier? It’s hard to say, because your eyes are in many ways superior to your camera sensor and because they adapt to the conditions, in ways that differ from your camera. For example, if you are in a room that has an excess of red, your eyes start seeing it as orange. Now, is that red or orange? Your camera says red, but your eyes say orange. Neither is incorrect. What about your screen? Is it calibrated? Can you trust the colors? Can you trust that exposure?
This is exactly why it is apt to say that you make a photo, not that that you take a photo. How can you even say that a photo is a representation of reality and to be judged according to how accurately it represents reality when what you see could equally well be said to be a representation of reality. It’s like comparing representations with representations. That doesn’t get us anywhere. It’s all circular then. There is no truth as such. Reality, yes, I’d say so, but truth of that reality, no. That’s our doing. It is we who construct it as such and such and then end up insisting that others do the same, ideally according to our terms, not in their terms, because … well … that serves our interests. Again, feel free to disagree. I’m in the non-representational camp about this, but I don’t insist that others have to construct the world according to my terms. It’s your loss, not mine.
Anyway, people like to think that cameras are somehow objective or capable of objectivity, inasmuch as the photographer remains objective, but that’s not the case. Photos are as artistic as a painting. Sure, there’s the real world, us included, but, like paintings, photos are not representations of anything. This is not to say that there’s isn’t resemblance. It’s rather that when we assess resemblance, it is we who insist that this resembles that. If you think that they are representations, well, feel free to disagree, but, in my view, that’s all in your head.
Back to the results of Toresson’s article. Nature is presented as rugged, with those sharp mountain peaks, meandering rivers and rough waterways and what is human built appears to be old and weathered, made from stone and wood, which then lends it this nostalgic trad vibe to it, as discussed by Toresson. Then there’s this other kind of soft vibe that you get by avoiding midday, going after that dawn and especially dusk golden yellow light, and/or when it gets foggy or hazy, which he also comments on extensively.
The photos are also neatly composed, and the use of colors is marked by a selective use of low or high saturation, to either get a bleak or washed-out vibe to the photos or make the colors pop. This also appears to be connected to low and high contrast, albeit I guess it’s more like micro contrast, which can give this gritty look to surfaces.
He doesn’t comment on it, but as someone interested in the absence of light, there’s a notable of nightscapes. Now, this is a technical thing. I don’t know what equipment the influencers use, whether they haul actual cameras with them during their travels, but it’s way, way harder to shoot in low light conditions, so I’m not actually surprised. If you attempt that with a phone, yeah, good luck with that.
What he does comment on, and what I think is particularly fascinating, is how people don’t really care about the locations but rather used them as mere referents for their landscape photos, which are then worked to match other existing landscape photos that rely on the same reference landscapes. Maybe the highlight of the entire article is the point where he points out how people can get so absorbed by this setup that they feel let down by the initial encounter with a specific location. There’s this expectation that the location is this stable referent that ought to appear as it appears in countless landscape photos, but, of course, it doesn’t. They are nonetheless content with, if not happy with taking a photo that matches those countless landscape photos.
While highly, highly unlikely, what could happen is that people realize from this mismatch that there is no referent and therefore also no representation. Oh, and it’s not that the people fail to appreciate that place, like somehow authentically, by taking a photo of it, thus experiencing it somehow inauthentically. No, no. There’s nothing wrong with photography. It’s rather that, for whatever reason, they seek to take, no, make a photo that adheres to countless other photos.
This is also the crux of the article, albeit explained in other terms. The problem here is not this or that landscape, nor its landscape traits, to explain this in terms used by Deleuze and Guattari in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, nor their depictions. It’s rather that the depictions adhere to what Deleuze and Guattari (172) specifically refer to as faciality and landscapity. I’m trying to avoid getting lost in their jargon, but, anyway, the point is that the people who took, sorry, made the photos discussed in Toresson’s article act in a certain way, kind of like according to a manual that indicates how they ought to depict landscapes. As Deleuze and Guattari (172) put it:
“Compose them both, color them in, complete them, arrange them according to a complementarity linking landscapes to faces.”
Now, long story short, there are the various landscape traits function as faces, which have their own facial traits, as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (168, 172). This can also work the other way around, so that a face can be understood as a landscape and the facial traits as landscape traits, like in extreme closeups of faces, as they (172) point out. Anyway, while distinct, they function the same way. Deleuze and Guattari (168) elaborate this:
“[They] are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations.”
Here the point is that a face or landscape, or a depiction of a face or a landscape, is defined according to its traits. What is valued or devalued, considered good or bad, is conveyed through signification, what they (168) call signifying traits, and indexed on certain facial traits and landscape traits.
They (168) liken faces and landscapes to frames and screens, to which the signifiers attach themselves. The former is apt in photography and videography, considering that both often refer to frames. The latter is also apt in the sense that a canvas that one paints on is a blank screen, just as computers, cinemas and televisions have blank screens, before something is depicted on them. That said, don’t go thinking that the frame or the screen, or the wall, as they (168) also call it, has to be a flat, neatly delineated surface.
It’s also worth noting that, for them, a face can also concern just about anything, such as everyday items, as they (175) point out:
“[It] is therefore effectuated not only in the faces that produce it but also to varying degrees in body parts, clothes, and objects that it facializes following an order of reasons (rather than an organization of resemblances).”
Here the last point is to emphasize that what they mean by face is not just a human face. I’d say it’s the surface that … faces us when we take a good look at it. Anyway, this is highly apt in the context of Instagram, considering that it’s common that people post photos of food, typically on plates, before eating the food. That food on a plate is a face and it has various faciality traits.
Toresson also makes notes of how landscape is duplicitous, as Stephen Daniels explains that in ‘Marxism, culture, and the duplicity of landscape’. In summary, the photos analyzed by Toresson are marked by nostalgia, which manifests itself in this seemingly harmonious human-nature relationship. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong about being in the middle of nowhere, by yourself, nor about photographing that. It’s rather that anything that contradicts this is conveniently left out of the frame, hidden behind something in the frame or erased from the frame. This is also a longing for something that probably never even existed. This is not to say that pre-industrial buildings weren’t constructed from wood and stone, or that there’s something inherently wrong about not using concrete and steel. Again, it’s rather that this longing gives the impression that there were these happier, simpler times … when you could die from a bad flu or an infected wound.
You can find others discussing this way of seeing and depicting the world. Lowenthal deals with this in ‘The American Scene’, Don Mitchell in ‘The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape’ and W. J. T. Mitchell in his ‘Preface to the Second Edition of Landscape and Power: Space, Place, and Landscape’, Maurice Ronai in ‘Paysages’ and Raymond Williams in ‘Border Country’. Then there’s Denis Cosgrove who discusses the underlying idea and its development in ‘Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea’. I’m sure there are others as well. This is just list some, in case you are interested in all this.
What’s also noteworthy, if not remarkable, about this article is that it is based on a Bachelor’s thesis, as noted in the acknowledgements. There’s this prevailing attitude, clearly horseshit, that people who don’t have a doctorate don’t know anything, about anything, and thus they can’t write anything that is worth anyone’s time. For me, this is great. The article is well researched, well written, and well illustrated. Easily a highlight, if not the highlight of the year for me.
References
- Burnham, B. (2021). White Woman’s Instagram. In B. Burhan (Dir.), Bo Burnham: Inside. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix.
- Cosgrove, D. E. (1985). Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10 (1), 45–62.
- Daniels, S. (1989). Marxism, culture, and the duplicity of landscape. In R. Peet and N. Thrift (Eds.), New Models in Geography, Vol. II (pp. 196–220). London, United Kingdom: Unwin Hyman.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Lowenthal, D. (1968). The American Scene. Geographical Review, 58 (1) 61–88.
- Lowenthal, D. ([1996] 1998). The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
- Mitchell, D. (1996). The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Mitchell, W. J. T. (Ed.) (2002). Landscape and Power (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
- Ronai, M., 1976. Paysages. Hérodote 1, 125–159.
- Toresson, N. (2025). Landscape constructions on Instagram: A postmodern reinvention of romanticism. Digital Geography and Society 9.
- Williams, R. H. (1960). Border Country. London, United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus.