half-baked thoughts on the pattern of skinny white women photobombing otherwise nice landscape photographs with their backs and ponytails

With new P.S. at the bottom!

Why are young, mostly blonde white women always with their backs to the camera in beautiful places in posts on Instagram?

Back in 1972, John Berger wrote something like, and I’m paraphrasing: “Men are always depicted controlling nature, while women are depicted as being nature.” In a sense then, if men are taught to control nature and women are taught to be nature, nature itself mediates the relationship between these two genders: men are indirectly taught to control women via being taught to control nature.

Good god, dense writing. But let me ask you a question, are the pictures above portraits or landscapes? If a person is made anonymous in that their face isn’t actually shown can a picture be a portrait? A picture that says: this is me? (def. “a painting, drawing, photograph…depicting only the face or head and shoulders.”) By anonymizing the female in the photograph the viewer is able to project anyone into that role, making these shots desirable in tons of weird ways.

But the defacing of the female also takes the implied action of the viewer away from identifying a person and toward taking in the landscape as a whole. By anonymizing the female the picture no longer serves the social function of indicating that ‘Becky was here on this date isn’t she cool,’ but instead a purely aesthetic or naturalized one, a general statement on gender norms. No longer was Becky there, but a girl, generally speaking, was there. Perhaps the girl you, the one with the male gaze, are thinking of was there in that beautiful landscape. Isn’t that a pretty thought?

By facing away from the camera the female figure becomes an empty signifier pointing not to a specific person but instead pointing to whatever particular woman (signified) the unsuspecting viewer wants to imagine. Importantly, this also naturalizes her into the landscape photograph as—rather than a specific woman when ideas and values and successes—a nameless species out there amongst nature with all the other living beings that we don’t give names and who also don’t have ideas about anything important to society (being nature). She becomes faceless, an object to be acted upon rather than a subject capable of action herself.

And so I think in a way these are a type of landscape shot that in addition to reinforcing all that life out there as a bunch of passive shit that should be acted on and improved upon by men, implicates women into that passive tangle of life. If you want, male gaze boy, you can extract whatever resources you’d like whenever you want from the resources out there in nature. And that includes the women. They’re just nature too. Don’t worry, you don't have to ask. Trees, gold, women…they don’t have a voice. Take what you want. Pulp? Money? Sex?

In a book Noel Sturgeon published a while ago she notes that John Berger also said: “Men act, women appear.” Her book outlines the ways in which this plays out in consumer advertising. Sturgeon says that often women are portrayed in advertising as literally subsumed by nature. In the Dolce and Gabbana ad below, the five women are in a garden and in floral patterns, almost camouflaged into the landscape.

And the anonymity is still important here, in that there are not five individual women in the ad, but three. Which is weird. Two women appear twice, and one (center) once. Does it matter? Or, here’s maybe the modern precursor to the young women photobombing landscape photos.

Sturgeon notes that “a key pattern is an association with [blonde] white women with purity and health.” In the advertising sense, the product takes on the desirable qualities of purity and health through the association with the cultural ideal of the naked white women enmeshed in water. God, “White Rain”? Really?

And so, in a sense, in places like Instagram external products are no longer being sold, but what is instead being sold now is the self. Reproducing these tropes that I think are probably subtly harmful leads to more likes. They’re recognizable, desirable…they make the viewer feel something enough to maybe double click the picture. Liking a picture of someone who is sort of anonymous also in some ways feels like a less intimate action than double-clicking on a true portrait. In the case of the girl photobombing-the-landscape-shot shot, one can “like” the photo for the landscape instead of just ass and yoga pants.

Anyway, a bunch of random thoughts. Almost never are men portrayed this way. I went through tons of places on Instagram and they are scattered and rare. The facelessness and gendered nature of this framing is a bit disturbing to me. This post isn’t to say that these posts should not exist, nor is it to shut down folks who reproduce these aesthetics (especially the women that do so!). It’s just to say what I’ve said.

It’s weird, isn’t it? All the skinny white women photobombing otherwise nice landscape photographs with their backs and ponytails?

And for no good reason, I’m just going to leave some pictures from Taylor Swift: the folklore and evermore album covers and reverses, and her at this year’s Grammys for your enjoyment. Girl’s engulfed in nature.

P.S. — The Whitest Turn Possible

Since writing this I’ve come upon this album cover from the band Dresden called Call of the Blood, which the Cosmotheist Church website calls “This is the very best White racialist popular music ever produced.” It’s noted that the album sports “handsome new full-color cover art — never seen before — by the artist Alfred Sundvall, who also created the art for the first edition of this monumental work.”

“The artist, Alfred Sundvall…shows a White woman on a high summit, gazing out over a fog-filled infinity of mountains and valleys — not unlike the view from Pierce Point on the Alliance’s land in West Virginia, which our founder William Pierce loved so much. The cover art was inspired by Dr. Pierce’s favorite painting, Caspar Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Mists.” How can we tell this is a white woman? The truth is, we can’t. But anyway, Friedrich’s painting is below.

The “Dr. Pierce” noted above as liking this painting more than any other is famous white supremacist/nationalist/racialist Dr. William Luther Pierce. In the art world, the aesthetic in the image is referred to as Ruckenfigur. The original function of this structure worked something like this: “A person is seen from behind in the foreground of the image, contemplating the view before them, and is a means by which the viewer can identify with the image's figure and then recreate the space to be conveyed.” The more I think about it the more Ruckenfigur reminds me of third-person video games.

Anyway, it’s interesting that the recent origins of this aesthetic often actually depict male figures gazing off into the distance, while in the world of Instagram it is almost entirely women. It is as though Ruckenfigur has fused in some way with American advertising’s dissolution of women into nature. There is something more voyeuristic about what’s going on now.

And then like, what is going on with the white supremacists? This article from a few years back called “Can't Shake It Off: How Taylor Swift Became a Nazi Idol” makes a few interesting points. The white supremacist folks quoted in it make a handful of bizarre conspiratorial claims, but they also make the very concrete claim that Taylor’s aesthetic overall is that of the Aryan ideal. One said that “Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry. Athena reborn. That's the most important thing.”

Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Taylor Swift’s aesthetics are playing with a powderkeg that’s tied up in explicitly white supremacist aesthetic culture. Her album covers are drawing from the same visual tropes as those most prized by serious supremacists like William Pierce, and her album title (folklore) is born ultimately from the Germanic Volk tradition— “The term Volk, in the vision of Nazis, had a broad set of meanings, and referred sometimes to the entirety of German nation and other times to the Nordic race.” In a sense this is true of any musician or artist calling themselves “folk,” but the word folklore itself is ultimately derived from the idea of the stories of the Germanic race. I think maybe the fairest way to say this is that, either way, in an entirely neutral sense, Taylor Swift is Germanic AF, as are the origins of all these white blonde girls posting pictures of their backs and ponytails in beautiful places. The Germans did some fucked up shit in recent history and now, as Nazism is resurgent, I’m not sure if we want to be reviving these aesthetics. If you’re curious about the way Volk is being used these days check out THIS site (tread carefully).

There is another way to understand this leveraging of Volk/Germanic/Nazi symbology though. At some point in A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology Slavoj Zizek talks about the fact that the German metal band Rammstein has often been accused of reviving old Nazi symbology and shit. Zizek says that:

“if one observes closely their show, one can see very nicely what they are doing: The minimal elements of the Nazi ideology enacted by Rammstein are something like pure elements of libidinal investment. Enjoyment has to be, as it were, condensed in some minimal tics, gestures, which do not have any precise ideological meaning. What Rammstein does is liberates these elements from their Nazi articulations. It allows us to enjoy them in their pre-ideological state. The way to fight Nazism is to enjoy these elements, as ridiculous as they may appear. This way you undermine Nazism from within.”

In other words, he’s saying that Rammstein is actually actively undermining the Nazi ideology by taking these aesthetics and symbols out of their Nazi ideological context and reassigning their meaning to something else by means of enjoyment. Similarly, Taylor Swift might have the power to reassign these Volk aesthetics away from pointing to Nazi shit and instead as pointing to her ideology, which in all honesty seems to be mostly like, white mainstream liberal ideology which is, to be sure, not perfect, but certainly not Nazi.

The central tension here is like, does reproducing symbols/tropes/narratives that were (and to some extent still are) attached to terrible groups and ideologies promote those ideologies or does it undermine them by rendering the connection between the symbol and the terrible ideas clear.

Anyway, I’ll keep digging!