Travel essay: Selfies - are they ruining travel?

Not every destination is rolling out the carpet for selfie snappers, however. In Mumbai, an epidemic of selfie deaths prompted Mumbai's local government to declare 16 selfie-free zones, the Washington Post reported this year. That followed a spate of 19 selfie-related fatalities, including three students who stopped for a selfie in front of an oncoming train.

The phenomenon is not limited to Mumbai. Similar accidents have happened around the world, including a 17-year-old Russian girl who died falling from a St Petersburg bridge and a 21-year-old Spanish man who died trying to take a selfie atop a train. However, Mumbai is the first place to have introduced such legislation, with fines of 1200 rupees ($24) levied on anyone who steps into the no-go zones, which are principally scenic coastal spots.

You can't help thinking that what Mumbai is really trying to do is outlaw stupidity. Good luck with that. However, if their legislation does seem to work, perhaps we could have a go at outlawing bad manners next. One of the main reasons selfie snappers aggravate their fellow travellers, after all, is their tendency to get in the way. It's a problem that has existed ever since cameras became affordable, but that stretched-arm pose adopted by selfie snappers does intrude further into other people's space than more traditional photo-snapping stances.

However, this is merely a symptom of a much larger problem, according to travel photographer Richard I'Anson: the need for better camera etiquette across the board. I'Anson, who leads photography trips to various countries, notes that many people seem to assume that holding a camera gives them a licence to intrude.

"The idea of photography ethics is something I talk about on my photography trips," he says. "As a photographer, I try to do what I do as discreetly as I can; I know I'm intruding on people's privacy. We have to be aware and we have to be sensitive and treat people with dignity."

Again, this is hardly a new phenomenon. Photography has always involved a power imbalance between the photographer and the subject. Indeed, in the earliest days of the art form, photographers wielded their power so flagrantly that it verged on abuse.

Take Maxime Du Camp, the man behind what was probably the world's first coffee table travel book. Accompanied by one of his friends – a then-unknown writer called Gustave Flaubert – Du Camp took a trip through Egypt and Syria in 1849. Du Camp recorded their travels using an early Calotype camera, and the photographs featured in a book that was published upon his return.

In those days, photography required long exposures, which made street scenes impossible to capture. Instead, Du Camp focused his camera on the area's ancient relics. To give a sense of scale of the massive monuments, Du Camp included the figure of a man in many of his photos. In one shot, for instance, the man – a servant of Du Camp's, called Hadji-Ishmael – stands next to the carving of a pharaoh's face, his entire body about the same length as the pharaoh's nose.

To modern eyes, it is outrageous to see someone carelessly clambering over these ancient statues. Even more outrageous, however, is the method that Du Camp used to ensure Hadji Ishmael stood still long enough for the exposure to be captured.

"The great difficulty was to get Hadji-Ishmael to stay perfectly motionless while I performed my operations; and I finally managed it be means of a trick," Du Camp wrote. "I told him that the brass tube of the lens jutting from the camera was a cannon, which would vomit a hail of shot if he had the misfortune to move – a story which immobilised him completely, as can be seen from my plates."

It wouldn't happen today, of course. In fact, as camera phones are becoming increasingly affordable even in developing nations, these days the locals are sometimes as keen to photograph tourists as the tourists are to photograph them. The ghost of Hadji-Ishmael would be amused, I think, at the way the tables have turned.

A flick through Du Camp's photos also reminds us of one overlooked aspect of social media: the amount of creativity it has encouraged. The cumbersome technology available to Du Camp limited his options for taking interesting photographs. Today's digital hand-held devices, by contrast, give us the freedom to literally look at a destination from a different angle. A quick scroll through Instagram reveals the inventiveness of amateur photographers, inspired by the endless array of images they see online.

For every straight-up travel selfie, there are dozens of shots capturing unusual angles or telling details: from finely carved window frames to hennaed hands, mist-wrapped trees to elongated shadows thrown into relief by brightly-coloured walls. It's clear that, for some travellers at least, their camera phone has tapped into an unexpected vein of creativity.

There is another aspect of the rise of the travel selfie phenomenon that is often overlooked. One of the reasons that they have taken off, I think, is because other souvenirs have largely lost their lustre. We used to eagerly carry home exotic items from our travels: carved jade from China, camel hair caps from Morocco, carpets from Iran. In today's globalised world, these hard-to-get items have lost their mystique. Chances are, the store down the road stocks something similar; if not, you can always order it over the internet. The glamour-backdrop selfie has taken over as the way to prove your status as an experienced traveller.

However, it's worth remembering that both selfies and souvenirs are, in some ways, a distraction. Travel is not just about what you see and do in a destination; it's about the impact the destination has on you. Take, for instance, Du Camp's travelling companion, Gustave Flaubert. For the young writer, the Middle East was a revelation, its streets full of colour, noise and movement.

"There was the most astounding racket, sticks thrashing out to left and right, every blow augmented by ear-splitting guttural exclamations," Flaubert wrote in one of his descriptions. "I gobbled up a bellyful of colour, like a donkey filling himself with oats."

He also gobbled up plenty of souvenirs, only some of which survived the journey home. The gazelle skins were eaten by worms en route; the embalmed Nubian crocodile fared better, as did piles of embroidered wool and silk from Beirut.

Far more precious than these keepsakes, however, were the impressions of exotic lands that Flaubert carried inside his head. These seductive images of the east that were to resurface repeatedly in his novels. From Madame Bovary to Salammbo, Flaubert's books were shaped by his travels. For ultimately, destinations work on us like Nietzsche's abyss: even as we try to capture them with a camera, they are also capturing us.