Uffizi selfie
An 18th Century oil painting has allegedly been damaged after a museum visitor tripped while taking a selfie.
Florence’s Uffizi Gallery said a tourist fell backwards while trying to “make a meme in front” of a portrait of Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, by Anton Domenico Gabbiani. The museum explained the damage could be repaired quickly but director Simone Verde warned restrictions on visitor behaviour could be imposed in the future.
If what you want to do is take selfies to impress your friends or social meeja or the unlucky people in your immediate vicinity then do it somewhere other than in front of a unique work of art, mkay?
Earlier this year at Palazzo Maffei, in Verona, a man seemingly slipped and fell on to a bejewelled chair by Italian artist Nicola Bolla. He had been taking photos with a woman, pretending to sit on the chair.
Museum director Vanessa Carlon said: “Sometimes we lose our brains to take a picture, and we don’t think about the consequences. Of course it was an accident, but these two people left without speaking to us – that isn’t an accident.”
Also sometimes we lose our brains because we’re too busy saying Look At Me!! to pay attention to where we are and what we’re doing and what other people might want, such as peace and quiet in a museum or gallery or ancient library.
I visited Le Louvre last spring. As always you had to wait in line for several minutes to see Leonardo’s famous La Joconde (“Mona Lisa”). It was so hilarious to watch one person after the other get to the front of the line only to turn his/her back to the painting…
Ugh that’s a major peeve of mine, which I’m sure I’ve aired here before – people who go to art museums and don’t look at the art but just photograph everything. I was once looking at something in the British Museum and a woman angrily gestured at me to get out of her way – because she wanted to take a snap.
I take photographs in natural history museums, but not art museums. I’m surprised they let you…
I do look at the stuff in the museum, and read the blurbs, before I snap the picture. I used the pictures in my lessons, and they were never selfies. I’m not interested in me; I’m interested in other things. Selfies are so…narcissistic. (I’m not sure I could manage a selfie with my camera, anyway; I lost the remote, I rarely have the tripod with me, and it’s not well set up for easy selfies like a phone is.)
It amazes me to go to museums (I mostly go to the natural history types, while my husband goes to the local art museum, but I’ve seen this happen in both) and see people walk by, glance at what I’m looking at, and pass by. They did their due diligence; they had their educational outing. Now they can get out of there and head for KFC for some greasy, nausea inducing fried chicken.
I stood in awe in front of a cast of Lucy…face to skullcap with her…while others raced by me, not the least bit interested by this incredible fossil. I always wonder why they are there.
I am not above taking a picture (not selfie) myself if I see something that really stands out to me, but not as a substitute for enjoying what’s right in front of me. An even bigger pet peeve of mine are people who go to concerts (!) and then spend the whole show looking at their phones. I once made a cartoon of two stick figures talking. The conversation went something like:
“How was the concert you went to?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to watch the recording on my cell phone yet.”
iknklast
As somebody once put it (from memory) there are only two reasons people read a book, because they like it or because they want to be able to say they’ve read it. I think the same logic applies to a lot more than reading.
Some travel photography advice I read years ago said not to waste your time taking photographs of great sights. There are many professional photographs of these sights. Instead, take pictures of your experience in these place, including yourself and others in your party in the images. I think that was a reasonable point. It does seem, however, that some people don’t even want to have the experience, just get pictures of themselves. Some people have a more contemplative experience by looking through a camera lens, but my personal preference these days is to look with my eyes (and the rest of my senses), not so much with the camera.
Also, I can certainly see the point of taking a photo if there’s a great slant of light or similar – but the robotic taking a snap of every single Famous Thing just for the sake of it is repellent to me.
Bjarte @ 4 – the looking at phones thing can get depressing fast. I went for an adventure (aka walk) on the other side of the lake this afternoon, and the bus trip to Kirkland and the one from Kirkland featured a whole lot of people silently scrolling. In a way it’s useful, because people aren’t burbling like inanities like all the like time, but in another way it’s a kind of zombification, and I hate it. An orca could jump out of the lake and ask for directions back to salt water and no one would notice.
OB, #8, I see that all the time. When I first started teaching, students would talk to each other while they waited for me to open the classroom. Some of the conversations were silly, trivial stuff, but they also talked about serious things they were learning. They became friends, and worked together as a class. By the time I retired, they would all be sitting in the large open space outside my classroom staring at their phones. There was little conversation in class; I had to pull it out of them. I didn’t allow phone use in my class, and when they left at the end, their phones were already in their hands. It was depressing.
I don’t see anything wrong with taking pictures per se as long as it doesn’t become a substitute for enjoying the real thing when you see it. The only “souvenirs” I’m interested in are memories. But memories are low-res and fade over time, so it’s nice to be able to store (some aspect of) the experience in a more high-res and durable format. You can say it’s pointless to take another picture of the Eiffel Tower when there are so many better pictures available on posters, postcards, the internet etc., but this is what the Eiffel Tower looked like to me from that particular angle in that particular light at that particular time. There are definitely experiences I wish I had pictures of that are now lost to me. All that remains is a vague “memory of a memory” (i.e. I no longer remember the experience itself, but I remember that I once did remember it). Memories can also get distorted over time. E.g. I recently went through some old pictures from various journeys, and I kept asking myself “where exactly was this taken?”. After some searching on Google Earth and Google Street View I was able to identify most of the places, and one picture in particular turned out to be taken in a completely different part of Budapest than what I had imagined.
So, once again, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with taking pictures as long as it’s done in a respectful, non-intrusive way (i.e. not like Ophelia’s experience from the British Museum #2). I just think it’s sad when showing other people on social media that “I have been there” becomes more important than actually “being there”.
In 2015 our granddaughter from the USA (then 10) was staying with us for a couple of weeks. We took her to the Louvre, where we went to see the Mona Lisa, which she wanted to see. There were great crowds of people taking selfies and photos of one another, paying little attention to the painting itself, and ignoring several other Leonardo masterpieces that could be seen in the corridor outside, such as La Vierge aux rochers, to my mind a much more interesting picture.
Exactly. I had the same experience decades ago, minus the selfies part. It’s just a kind of touching base thing.
I tend to take pictures of things that catch my fancy–oddities, strange juxtapositions, things that have personal significance–though I’m not above taking pictures of famous sights.
As for museums, I get saturated pretty quickly. I’d rather go and look at a few paintings and leave, or a focused exhibition at a science museum. After a half hour or so, I could be the one racing past that fascinating object, not because I’m not interested, but because I’ve reached my limit. (One nice thing about living in the DC area is that so many of the museums are free, so you don’t have the pressure of needing to get your money’s worth.)
One thing I find even more annoying than picture taking is videotaping the museum. Do they really go back and watch those?
I do have a bunch of pictures I took on several trips to the Tyrell museum in Drumheller Alberta. I didn’t take any selfies but did get a picture taken by a companion of me next to a dinosaur leg bone.
I think everyone gets saturated quickly. There’s only so much the brain can take in.
WaM
I don’t mind spending several hours in a museum, but one thing I learned from the Louvre was that sometimes you have to be selective. IIRC according to Lonely Planet seeing everything that’s on display would take about 9 months!
Does that work though? I don’t mind spending hours in a museum, but doing so is counter-productive at least for me and I suspect for others. I think the human brain can take in only so much before it refuses.
It’s not just the brain, it’s the body.
I can sit and read for hours (if I don’t fall asleep), or take long walks, but there’s something about museums that just tires me out.
I bet I know what one something is that tires us out: it’s slow walking. It dawned on me embarrassingly recently – as in sometime in the past few months – that walking fast is LESS tiring than walking slowly. I thought about it (while walking briskly) and decided it must be because one doesn’t settle the full weight with each step when walking briskly.
But also just looking at stuff is tiring. I think I’ve mentioned before that it took me ages to realize one must NEVER try to see all or even most of the Victoria & Albert Museum because there is just far far far too much of it.
While I can usually manage botanical gardens for a long time, I had this insight at Kew Gardens. What I would like to do is go back when I can stay longer, and visit it over a few days, doing a small bit of it at a time. It’s just too much for one day.
And I agree; slow walking is EXHAUSTING. My husband currently can’t keep up because of health problems, and trying to help him go somewhere is worse than just blowing through and doing it. I have to arrange to drop him off close to the venue, because I can’t slow walk for long. And he can stay in art museums for hours; I can really only manage half an hour.
Ophelia
If nothing else one advantage of taking pictures in museums is that I can compare the time stamps of the first and the last picture to get a lower limit of the duration of my visit, and I can safely say that some of them have lasted more than 3 1/2 hours. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m weird :D
The slow walking bit makes sense. Probably explains why I don’t like shopping much either.
As someone who doesn’t do much fast walking, I don’t find fast walking less tiring than slow walking; quite the opposite. If I’m going somewhere with a fast walker, and I try to keep up, I am completely exhausted early on and unable to do much walking at all for a long time, whereas if I just proceed at my own slow pace, I get there eventually, and I’m fine to do some more walking later.
I love museums, and I can spend hours there, so long as I can spend large portions of those hours sitting. Standing still is almost as bad as walking fast. Most museums provide places to sit and look at various large pieces of art, and I take advantage of those often.
I cannot read a book for hours anymore. I read in small bursts, a few minutes here and there. I spend a lot of time on the internet, but also in small bursts, flitting between various things.
Hmmm yes I should probably clarify that what I mean by fast walking is not what genuinely fast walkers do. My fast walk is a fast walker’s slow walk. Fast walkers pass me as if I were standing still. I try to match their pace and I cannot do it unless I just plain run. It mystifies me because they don’t even LOOK as if they’re walking very fast. But it’s still true that brisk-for-me is less tiring than slow-for-me.
It’s very unfair that brisk-for-me is actually slow. Phooey.