On immersive pop-ups, instagrammable walls, and what happens when everything becomes a backdrop
I attended an immersive experience in Shoreditch last month, by which I mean I paid money to walk through some rooms and take photographs, and as I wrote for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, where my notes on the photographable city are gathered, I have become quietly fascinated by the rise of the experience economy, the booming trade in spaces and events that exist primarily to be documented rather than experienced. We have started building things to be photographed, and it is changing what the city is for.
The room that is really a backdrop
The defining venue of the experience economy is the space designed from the ground up to look good on a phone, the wall painted in exactly the right shade, the neon slogan positioned for the perfect selfie, the installation that is less an artwork than a photo opportunity with an entry fee. These places are proliferating across the East End, immersive this and instagrammable that, and they are commercially shrewd, because they have understood something true about how people now move through the world: that for many, an experience does not fully count until it has been documented and shared. The cultural and economic life this represents is part of what bodies like the Greater London Authority track as the city’s events economy, and the independent operators behind it are exactly the small enterprises that Office for National Statistics data shows increasingly shape the urban high street.
The experience that exists to be left
What strikes me as genuinely odd, and worth thinking about, is that these spaces are often designed to be photographed rather than enjoyed, optimised for the image you will take and share rather than the time you will actually spend there. The experience is, in a sense, complete the moment you have the photograph; the rest is incidental. I watched a room full of people at one of these venues photographing everything and looking at almost nothing, present in body and absent in attention, gathering images of an experience they were not quite having. It was strange, and a little melancholy, and entirely the point.
The performance of leisure
The experience economy is, at heart, the conversion of leisure into performance, the transformation of the things we do for pleasure into content for an audience. The meal, the event, the holiday, the afternoon out, all of it increasingly carries a second purpose, to be documented and displayed, to become evidence of a life well lived rather than simply the living of it. There is a low-grade pressure in this, a sense that an unphotographed experience is somehow wasted, that pleasure must be proven, and it can quietly turn the things meant to relax us into one more thing to be managed and optimised.
The case for the backdrop
And yet I do not want to be entirely the scold, because there is genuine joy and genuine creativity in some of this too. People have always wanted to mark their experiences, to keep a record, to share their delight, and the instinct to photograph a beautiful or strange or funny moment is not new or shameful. The best of the immersive spaces are genuinely playful, genuinely creative, genuinely fun, and the desire to capture and share an experience can be an expression of joy rather than mere performance. The backdrop is not the enemy; the trouble comes only when the backdrop becomes the whole point, when the photograph replaces the experience instead of recording it.
The photograph I will probably still take
So I will keep attending the immersive experiences, keep paying to walk through rooms designed for my phone, keep photographing the perfectly positioned neon, while trying, not always successfully, to actually be there as well as to document being there. The experience economy has understood something real about us, and resisting it entirely is neither possible nor entirely desirable. But I am trying, in my small way, to look at things as well as photograph them, to have the experience as well as the picture of it, and to remember that the most worthwhile moments are often the ones I forget to capture. I will, of course, still take the photo. I am only human, and the wall really is the perfect shade.
The attention we are actually spending
The thing I keep returning to, underneath the jokes about neon walls, is the question of attention, which is the one genuinely scarce resource in all of this. The experience economy does not just sell us rooms; it competes for the limited attention we have, and the more of it we spend documenting our lives, the less remains for actually living them. There is a real cost to moving through the world as a photographer of one’s own existence, present enough to capture the moment but rarely present enough to inhabit it, and I notice it most in the places designed precisely to encourage that divided, documentary way of being.
So my small resolution, made and broken roughly weekly, is to spend a little more of my attention on the experience and a little less on the evidence of it. To look before I photograph, to stay a moment after the picture is taken, to let some experiences go unrecorded entirely. It is harder than it sounds, in a city increasingly built to be photographed, but it feels like the right fight, a quiet insistence that my attention is mine to spend, and that the most worthwhile moments are often the ones I choose not to capture at all.
For more on the photographable life, the team enjoys NewsThump, unfiltered since launch.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
