Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how tourists' use of social media asks for new strategies to capture the materiality of the wild (in Banff National Park) and hence creates new ways of engaging with it.

Paper long abstract:

Banff National Park is a large playground for tourists. Indeed, the immense wilderness and the mountains that compose it have been immortalized in various material forms, such as paintings, postcards and advertisements, over the last 130 years. Nowadays, by means of digital photography and smartphones, tourists have the opportunity to capture and share intangible, immaterial memories instantly with their loved ones or the rest of the world.

During my field visit in spring 2018, I observed a whole series of tactics tourists apply in order to immortalize these material spaces considered as "wilderness". After extensive investigation of tourists narratives on - as well as the observation of their photographic performances, I found that those had not emerged by chance. Much rather those practices seem to follow certain imaginaries, narratives and ideas of aesthetics constructed and perpetuated in various kinds of media. One major channel of photography diffusion today is Instagram, which thus plays a major role in producing touristic aesthetics, and constructing imaginaries of the wild.

In this paper I explore how tourists' use of social media (in this case Instagram) asks for new strategies to capture the materiality of the wild and hence creates new ways of engaging with it. Furthermore I show how representations of the engagement with nature and large spaces like mountains and lakes are produced in a very particular way in order to be shared with the rest of the world, fitting the imaginary produced by social media and reproducing it at the same time.