Landscapes for “likes”: capitalizing on travel with Instagram

This paper seeks to articulate how ideological representations of the landscape are deployed on social media for the aggrandizement of self. One of the most common forms used in this practice is a visual motif termed the promontory witness, which draws on the semiotic canons of the colonial picturesque and the Romantic sublime to showcase a lone tourist, poetically emplaced at a point of vantage above an otherwise empty landscape. The motif’s prominence on Instagram may be attributed to three outcomes afforded by the platform: a mediated travel habitus hegemonically informs prevailing aesthetic norms, the scalability of embodied performances entrenches the motif’s narrative underpinnings, and the monetizable market of Instagram encourages neoliberal notions of the branded self. A case study of four promontory witness images seeks to demonstrate the ideological valences of this motif and the ways in which landscape is commodified as a tradeable good on Instagram’s marketplace.