Seeing an image of a footballer and the girlfriend by placing Canyon, famous, I have had a chill of recognition. Antelope Canyon is an unusual rock formation: a reddish wall tunnel that time and floods have shaped mild waving. The light is filtered here and there in psychedelic gusts. It is, in short, a tourist background scarped on Earth as a divine intervention. It receives more than one million visitors each year. The canyon is located within the Navaho territory, and it is the same indigenous community that organizes the access and ensures that each visitor lives a full aesthetic experience.
This means ensuring that tourists take the right photos. At the entrance to Antelope Canyon, at the beginning of 2020, I found myself in the midst of an eclectic group that carefully listened to the instructions of a Navaho Guide. Much of the explanation focused on how to properly set the camera. Whether you brought a DSLR or an iPhone or a Samsung, the guide dictated the optimum parameters: manual mode, ISO, shutter speed, diaphragm opening. The light characteristics of the canyon called for accuracy. Then, if not, everything would be crying.
The visit was as depressing as revealing. The guide led us diligently to the most photogenic points of the canyon, where we had to take turns to portray ourselves while the rest of the group was waiting in a strategic corner, out of plan. Photography was not a memory but the ultimate goal, the raison d’être of the pilgrimage to the northern border of Arizona. Throughout the route the groups often overlap, which extended the wait and conferred the family of massive air. To counteract the restlessness – as always as the tourist desecration of a sacred place, whether it is Auschwitz or, last week, wrote the Testing-, I wondered what would have been made of the place if it had never been opened to the public. It is not a very complex exercise. The response is usually human negligence, natural degradation, eventual destruction.
A About the pictureSusan Sontag, which “is especially attractive to people suffering from ethics of relentless work: Germans, Japanese and American.” Continuous click “relieves the anxiety that people focused on work feel about not working when they are on vacation and are supposed to be having a good time.” The essay precedes the appearance of Instagram in several decades, but anticipates the alienating effect. “The act of photographing has established a relationship of chronic voyeurism with the world that puts at the same level the meaning of all events.” I doubt that Sontag was able to anticipate how carefully accurate it would become this statement. In the infernal show of the Scroll Infinit, the photo of the football player at Antelope Canyon was preceded, and followed, of images of the genocide by inanition that Israel commits to the Gaza Strip.
