Paper short abstract:

What makes glaciers “Instagram-able”? This question about the fascination of the cryosphere to tourists seems to be related to present day smartphone and social media society, but will be traced back also to the Belle Époque, when bourgeois tourists posed on or in front of glaciers for a photograph.

Paper long abstract:

What makes glaciers “Instagram-able”? This question about the fascination of the cryosphere to tourists seems to be related to present day smartphone and social media society, but can be traced back to the Belle Époque, when bourgeois tourists in the Alps, in Norway or in the Rocky Mountains posed on or in front of glaciers for a photograph. This paper aims to explore the attraction of glaciers to alpine tourist from the late 19th century onwards. Looking at the example of the Swiss mountains, glaciers even became the drivers to construct cog railways to altitudes never reached before. In this way, wealthy tourists could just stop near the glacier, admire a spectacular view, and pose in front of this scenery or even on the ice itself. Photographers such as Arthur Gabler from Interlaken (canton of Bern) made a big business with accompanying these tourists for a professional photo. He also sold these photographs as postcards to send them home from the Bernese Oberland. In this way, an attitude similar to our today’s “Instagram society” can be observed. Based on a visual environmental history approach using photographs and poster advertisements combined with written evidence, this paper tries to shed a light on the development of human-glacier relationships for the last 140 years. However, as an outlook, it will also ask how this alpine tourism infrastructure constructed for glacier experiences will cope with a future, when the glaciers have shrunk or totally vanished.