In a discursive and visual cultural analysis, representations of the non-human world, how they are situated in historically inherited ways of seeing, and what implications they might have for how humans approach and understand the non-human world are traced and reflected upon. This article aims to unravel, illuminate, and problematize ways of seeing the non-human world in tourists’ Instagram posts about Swedish national parks, and also to consider the productive effects these might have on the relationship between humans and the non-human world. One country that is currently facing a shift towards an enhanced emphasis on tourism in its national parks is Sweden. Tourism in national parks is on the rise and contributes to shaping notions of the non-human world (often depicted as ‘nature’). A case study of four promontory witness images seeks to demonstrate the ideological valences of this motif and the ways in which landscape is commodified as a tradeable good on Instagram’s marketplace. The motif’s prominence on Instagram may be attributed to three outcomes afforded by the platform: a mediated travel habitus hegemonically informs prevailing aesthetic norms, the scalability of embodied performances entrenches the motif’s narrative underpinnings, and the monetizable market of Instagram encourages neoliberal notions of the branded self.
One of the most common forms used in this practice is a visual motif termed the promontory witness, which draws on the semiotic canons of the colonial picturesque and the Romantic sublime to showcase a lone tourist, poetically emplaced at a point of vantage above an otherwise empty landscape. This paper seeks to articulate how ideological representations of the landscape are deployed on social media for the aggrandizement of self.
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