Photos of People Taking Photos

Yikes. It's been a while.

I spent more than half of August seeing (nearly) every single famous piece of artwork, extravagant church and ruin that Italy has to offer, courtesy of my amazing Uncle Steve who was my travel companion, guide and historian—all of which he does with ease and expertise. Five days after I returned to the States—incredibly cultured, fancy and exhausted—I moved out of my first New York apartment and into a much bigger, better and (inexplicably) cheaper apartment 15 blocks north.

I was also insanely busy at work, designing (among other things) a double-page spread in the New York Times, which was a crazy dream come true to open up the paper of record and see something I more-or-less created staring right back at me. BUT none of that is really important because this is a blog about adventures, and I have so many of them to recount that even if I stayed locked in my apartment (with my two fireplaces—!) for the rest of this year I would still have things to blog about. So, although I have barely had time to unpack let alone make any significant dent in the more than two thousand photos I took in Italy, I came across a group of photos I took in Florence that I just had to share immediately.

Florence was the second city on our itinerary and after the grand scale and ruin of Rome, it was a welcome change of pace. Florence was beautiful and significantly more compact than Rome, so we had more of an opportunity to focus our time.

One of our stops was the Galleria dell'Accademia to see Michelangelo's masterpiece, the David. Arguably one of the most, if not the most, famous statues in the entire world, the David is the Accademia's main attraction. There isn't much more in the museum, although my uncle and I both found Michelangelo's unfinished slave sculptures to be equally as intriguing and worthy as the more polished and idealistic David.

Once I got over the initial, surreal feeling of seeing such a crazy-iconic piece in real life, I shifted my focus to the crowd's behavior in the presence of such a famous work. There were a lot of selfies which are always incredibly awkward to witness—I feel the same way watching people take selfies as I do when I accidentally make eye contact with a dog that is mid-poop. Both activities seem intensely intimate and out-of-place in a public setting. But just because I'm uncomfortable does not mean that I'm not also fascinated—with how/if people smile, how they arrange themselves in front of the backdrop of choice and what they do following a successful capture (presumably Instagram it?).

Most people, however, immediately took out their phone and quickly snapped a photo of the David, because we all know if you don't photograph/Instagram it, it didn't really happen (I'm completely guilty of this, by the way). I spent the rest of our time in the Accademia basically stalking people—with the kind of zero-fucks-given attitude that can only come with being a tourist very, very far from anyone that could possibly recognize you—and trying to capture the David through their phone screen, or if I was really lucky, their iPad.

There was just something so removed and automatic about most of the people's photos—many didn't even take a moment to consider the statue without a screen between their eyeballs and the marble masterpiece. I wonder what Michelangelo would think if he suddenly walked into the future and saw girls posing with their best duck-face or people trying to figure out how to best fit his nearly 17 feet-tall statue within the Instagram frame?