Are We Post-Lifestyle?
In an Instagram littered with #sponsored posts, the dream of aspiration is dead
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
—John Ashbery, “This Room”
One unseasonably warm January day, I head to the intersection of Washington and Water streets in Brooklyn. This intersection is not a landmark in and of itself, but rather the framing for a photograph. Washington Street runs perpendicular to the water, pointing north toward the Manhattan skyline and the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a view that makes the heart soar — popularized by the poster for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) — but increasingly, it’s a view to collect.
Groups of friends take turns posing in front of the bridge as it straddles the distant Empire State Building. The young people here are following a map that has already been geotagged by Instagrammers of the past. The “placeness” of the place is not in the cobblestone street below or the towering bridge above, but the intersection’s function as a set of popular photo coordinates.
