Photos of people at top Instagram spots taking selfies are intended to tell us something about ourselves

Natacha de Mahieu’s series of images taken at some of the world’s most popular Instagram spots highlight how little people engage with the landscapes they snap

Using a time-lapse technique, she shows how even a location only recently popularised on Instagram is conceptually crowded

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An image from photographer Natacha de Mahieu’s new series “Theatre of Authenticity” of Cappadocia, in Türkiye, where thousands of travellers jostle for space each morning to take selfies and pose on vintage cars. Photo: Natacha de Mahieu

Published: 7:15pm, 8 Oct 2022

Photographer Natacha de Mahieu has been turning her lens on some of the world’s most photographed sights. But she’s not doing it to tell us anything new about them. She wants to tell us something about ourselves.

The 26-year-old Belgian photojournalist’s new series of images, “Theatre of Authenticity”, is a reaction to the way social media has brought us a form of mass individualism, in which many of us go to the same places and take the same images as everyone else – the ones we’ve seen on social media.

“I only choose natural places, because I like to have the feeling that I’m alone in a beautiful spot – it’s a kind of invisible tourism,” she says, on a video chat from Belgium.

But this is what everyone else does, too.

“In an afternoon or a week or through the summer season you can have so many people there. It’s not always something that you can feel, and it’s also not something that you can see on social media. Social media is the starting point for this kind of invisible mass tourism, where people are just showing themselves alone in places.”

This montage, photographed at Lac Blanc in Chamonix, France, over a period of about an hour, provides a snapshot of the footfall that contrasts with the images of untamed and empty nature found on Instagram under the hashtag #lacblanc. Photo: Natacha de Mahieu

De Mahieu sets up a camera to take pictures of people taking pictures in which the place is merely a backdrop for a portrait. Then, by careful selection and superimposition, she shows how even a location only recently popularised on Instagram is conceptually crowded.