I’m not a “selfie” person, and I shudder when I see “selfie sticks”, those things look like cattle prods to me. I don’t see the virtue in constantly taking photos of yourself, but if that’s what makes you happy, go for it. Just leave the art out of it. A great deal of art work gets damaged by those seeking selfie perfection in the never-ending I can top that! selfie competition. The latest victim to selfie-ism is a statue of Dom Sebastiao, who ruled Portugal from 1557 to 1578, at Lisbon’s Rossio train station.
The statue of Dom Sebastiao before it was destroyed. Courtesy of Peter Burka, via Flickr Creative Commons.
The statue of Don Sebastiao was broken by a young man taking a selfie. Courtesy of Infrastructure Portugal.
The 126-year-old statue shattered after a 24-year-old man reportedly knocked it over while climbing on it to take a photograph. The suspect, who has not been named, is said to have attempted to flee the scene before being apprehended by police.
A spokesperson for Infrastructure Portugal told the Daily Mail that he did not know when the statue would be repaired. Before the unfortunate incident, the sculpture was perched in a niche between two doorways at the station, which is a protected monument.
[…]
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Last May, a pair of tourists damaged a statue of Hercules in the northern Italian city of Cremona while taking a photograph with it. In 2014, an Italian student tried to pose sitting in the lap of a 19th-century cast of an ancient work at Milan’s Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, only to smash the sculpture in the process.
Some museums have taken steps to protect their art by banning selfie sticks, which extend the reach of the photographer, and may increase the likelihood of inadvertently striking a work of art. (Even without selfies, accidents happen, like the boy who lost his balance and punched $1.5 million painting, or the woman who tripped and smashed an ancient Greek vase.)
We have seen an increase in the number of visitors at certain national parks injured by wildlife because they are taking selfies. At least the bison and elk don’t fall down and shatter. And last fall, rangers at Mount Rushmore had to perform an S&R for a man determined to get a selfie, a really, really close-up selfie, with Lincoln.
This sucks.
Throw the book at this idiot.
Ogvorbis:
Oh FFS. It’s ridiculous, really, and even more so because people don’t seem to care at all about getting injured, or ending up dead for a fucking photo.
Brother Ogvorbis @1:
I agree. This is vandalism in its worst form. Whether it is intentional or not does not matter. It is similar to if someone driving accidentally kills another person, they are still charged with death by motor vehicle. The perpetrator of these acts of vandalism should be charged with a crime and forced to pay all costs of restoration of the art.
Caine @2:
Or maybe, sometimes, they are that fucking clueless about the real world. I remember reading recently about a woman who got into a tiger enclosure at a zoo so that she could pet the pretty kitties. Darwin awards waiting to be awarded.
Back in the Dark Ages of Siobhan’s life, she made a living being a public interpreter at an animatronic dinosaur place. The problem was that the exhibit was outdoors, built atop a wooden boardwalk, in a swamp. The secondary function of the facility was to fulfill certain parts of the local education curriculum, so the swamp was reasonably well preserved, in order to meet the province’s courses on wetland environments, and thus qualify for more public grants. People would forget where they were and they would get off the boardwalk to go take a selfie with the robot dinosaurs.
In a knee-deep bog. With patches of what might as well be quicksand.
Filled with poisonous, stinging plants, some of which are lethal to the kids they were dragging along.
In a facility that’s at least 30 minutes away from the nearest emergency responder.
The fact that the employees never entered the bog unless they were covered in an inch of rubber up to their chests still didn’t clue people in that maybe, just maybe, they’re not supposed to be man-handling the exhibit positioned 50 metres into the brush.
If there’s enough folks who will defy the degree of common sense needed to not do that, I don’t doubt that they’d be mindless of what the art represents when it’s thousands of years old.
Siobhan @5:
I guess that you couldn’t just let evolution weed them out of the population because if you had left them in the bog, it would have damaged the natural environment. Pity.
For the idiots who do things like that : mandatory community service of guarding that or another cultural treasure from idiots like themselves. Even just on weekends or after work, in which case the community service could extend to quite a number of years.
When I looked at this, initially, I thought the “selfie” you were referring to was the statue. After all, it’s how the wealthy and powerful used to get their selfies.
I admit that I usually have a hard time digging up sympathy for people who hurt themselves taking selfies. When they endanger others and destroy artwork, I have no problem getting fucking angry.
Giliell @ 9:
Same here. And I think Beatrice (@ 7) has the perfect punishment, too.
When I was in Iceland my hosts told me (somewhat gleefully) about a photographer who was taking a selfie with one of the geysers and stepped into a fumarole. Whups. I think losing a leg is a bit of an extreme lesson.
Marcus:
Is it? Perhaps they should be grateful their stupidity didn’t cost them their life. The problem with this selfie-ism is that these type of stunts don’t just endanger the photographer, they destroy priceless works of art, and endanger other people and wildlife.
Some photographers, such as wildlife photographers, specialists in extremes (climate, sports, etc.) know the types of danger they will be in, and generally, try to be knowledgeable about what they will be facing, and how to cope if things go very fucking wrong. I’ve done my share of stupid things in pursuit of a photo, and was fully aware of it at the time. What I wasn’t doing was endangering anyone else, and I was doing my best to not endanger myself, either.
This idiotic pursuit of “lookit me!” photos is nothing more than one upsmanship, and it is fueled by stupidity, both the ignorant and willful types.
Perhaps the first rule of the selfie should be “Don’t use props you don’t own”.
Ice Swimmer:
Good rule.
I’ve done my share of stupid things in pursuit of a photo
The silver halite gods nearly claimed me the time I over-warmed my collodion and it violently spewed all over the darkroom right before I lit the heater. If it was after I lit the heater, I’d just be a footnote in google news.
Actually, I just did a text about people taking bear selfies with my 8th grade. It cites a wildlife photographer who’s like “why would anybody be so stupid to turn their back on a bear 40 m away????”
Not that long ago, the Flying Scotsman steam train got restored and there was a lot of fanfare around its first journey from London to York. The driver had to keep stopping, because of the remarkable number of individuals who thought the best way to get a shot was stood on the tracks with a bloody big steam train thundering down on them!
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/25/trespassers-force-flying-scotsman-steam-train-unscheduled-stop-inaugural-run
Katybe:
*Gobsmacked*.
I’m all for selfies, in selfie principle -- if it’s something that makes you feel like you’re expressing yourself, sure (as self-portraits they might have low artistic or historical value, but they might have great emotional value for someone’s self-esteem, for example).
But I definitely take issue with the show-off factor that often seems to be a necessity, and that somehow seems to necessitate, as Ice Swimmer points out, using props that you don’t own (which is just plain old vandalism or breaking of by-laws in the case of protected natural areas or clearly marked areas of no-entry), or doing this in situations that are a clear danger to one’s personal safety and health -- which is usually a sign of danger to the personal safety and health of others as well (standing too close to that statue at the wrong time -- yeeaaaaahhhh…). It’s plain old selfish and arrogant to believe oneself somehow exempt from the rules of nature or the rules of law in order to justify a ‘cool’ photo that nobody else will have. Personally, the especially dangerous ones make me cringe (the Cliffs of Moher were a particularly eye-opening example, as seen in real life *shudder*).