This picture doesn’t do the ridiculousness justice. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. June 29, 2019.

Our recent trip to Florence turned me off taking pictures. If you look at my article about the opportunities Florence missed and the post about the best food we ate while in Florence, you’ll notice a dearth of photographs.

I felt so disgusted and appalled by tourist photo-taking behavior that it soured me on wanting to take even the most mundane snapshots almost entirely.

While you’ll still see plenty of people taking snapshots with point-and-shoot cameras while schlubbing around in “Underneath this Belly is a Smoking-Hot Dad” t-shirts, the advent of social media has skyrocketed the number of people who seem to visit places just for the photos—and who inconvenience everyone around them while capturing their staged moments in overelaborate clothing worn in contorted poses.

The efforts required to pack and put on these outfits and to wrangle themselves into just the right angles and spots for just the right shots cannot possibly allow them to appreciate the place they’ve spent so much time and money visiting. Though if they didn’t take the trip for the culture, they may not care.

Let’s Start with The Clothing

I saw many people in frilly, ridiculous outfits in Amsterdam. Tulle in florescent colors must photograph well.

In Florence, I counted three women in formal evening gowns climbing narrow medieval stairways to pose precariously along railings at the top of ancient towers. (Note: I doubt that the handrails, walls, floors, or anything whatsoever else in these stairwells and towers had received any level of cleaning since their installation.)

I hope these women went back to their hotels after the photo shoots—performed predominantly with smartphones and selfie sticks, mind you, not with professional cameras—and changed into clothing that allowed them to more comfortably enjoy the city. During the photo shoots, I can’t see a way these women could focus on much more than the picture-taking underway.

Although not seen in Florence, in Amsterdam I saw bevies of tourist women (not people who lived or worked locally, I assure you) dressed in equally uncomfortable-looking clothing that scanned away from “runway chic” over onto the “sexy” side of the fashion spectrum. These people tended to pose in the seedier streets for suggestively angled smartphone shots.

To each her own, yet some of what these women wore wouldn’t easily accommodate walking distances on Amsterdam’s rough, cobblestoned streets. As with the ballgown-wearing tourists in Florence, I hope the sexily garbed women in Amsterdam didn’t wear these outfits for their entire stay.

After all, you’ll find an entire suite of comfortable—and stylish!—travel clothing that makes focusing on the place and not your clothes possible.

On to the Behavior

We counted no fewer than six people taking photos of their gelato or drinks in front of old doors, bridges, churches, and other historical sites in Florence.

We waited around for half an hour to see when he’d finally take a sip. Eventually, we gave up. Florence, Italy. October 19, 2019.

This behavior was benign—it just looked odd. I’ll take odd over the obnoxious or dangerous.

Because some behavior posed actual danger or genuine disrespect and inconvenience to the people taking the photos and to the people around them.

The tulle-clad and the sexy-posing women stopped traffic not because they looked fantastic, but because they wanted clear-of-people shots and they or their photographers needed to take photos from just the right distances and angles. Often, they blocked bustling or precarious spaces for relatively lengthy periods of time while they took several photos to get just the right one.

Photographers in both places dangerously prostrated themselves along the automobile-traversed streets to get photographs from funky perspectives. People stabbed selfie sticks abruptly into bustling crowds along narrow pathways in tiny spaces. More benignly, yet equally irritatingly, people jabbed their phones and sticks into your line of vision while you admired a view or a piece of art or architecture so that they could snap a shot.

And all the other visitors in the medieval towers in Florence, climbing behind and past the overdressed women on the narrow flights of stairs and edging around them on the thin balconies, had to take especial care not to muss these women’s dresses.

When Travel is Just about the Photos

Do people today travel just to show other people on social media that they traveled—and that they looked fabulous while traveling? Do people forget about the learning and experiencing parts of travel?

Sure, in the not-so-distant past, people developed film onto slides to click through travel adventures with friends. However, film and its processing had a not-negligible cost. People didn’t take hundreds of photos a day and, as they couldn’t see the photos the instant they took them, they didn’t have as many in-the-moment retakes. They got the photos they got and only knew what they got when they got home.

Also, people didn’t travel as much then as they do now; travel has gotten more affordable for a lot more people. Once upon a time, irritating tourist behavior didn’t happen en masse. We saw some obnoxious behavior and clothing in Aix-in-Provence, the Luberon, the tiny town of Colmar, and Alsace in general, yet all these places had less tourist concentration than Florence and Amsterdam.

The confluence of the social media era and an increase in tourist volume means that the problem with traveler behavior won’t ameliorate anytime soon.

Would respectful-traveler classes help? I doubt it, though I’d cheer on any tour operators who started to offer them. Alas, people seem mostly to care about themselves, not the people around them.