Why Every Beautiful Place Starts to Look the Same - The Mistery of Photopoints

Have we started photographing places — or just repeating on a photopoint?

There was a moment in Hallstatt on my field trip for my university thesis when I realized something felt… strangely familiar.

Not in the comforting, nostalgic way — but in a way that made the place feel almost pre-seen. As if I had already been there, not physically, but visually. I knew where to stand. I knew what the photo should look like. And, more unsettlingly, so did everyone else.

People weren’t really searching for a perspective — they were arriving at one.

At a very specific photopoint by the lake, you could almost sense an invisible marker in the air. One step here, slight turn, chin up, camera out. Click. Done. Move on.

And then, at some photopoint, the irony becomes almost impossible to ignore.

In trying to capture the view, we slowly start to cover it — with our bodies, our phones, our presence carefully positioned between the place and the lens.

The photo becomes more important than what it was meant to remember.

The rise of visual standardization

What we are witnessing is something often referred to as visual standardization — a subtle but powerful effect of digital platforms shaping how we see and capture places.

Social media doesn’t just inspire travel — it predefines it.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok reward familiarity. Certain compositions, angles, and locations perform better, get more visibility, and are therefore repeated. Over time, these images become templates. And when we arrive, we don’t explore — we recreate.

Research suggests that digital media plays a key role in shaping what tourists expect to see and how they choose to represent their experiences (Urry & Larsen, 2012). The “tourist gaze” is no longer just socially constructed — it is now algorithmically reinforced.

When experience becomes replication

The result is a quiet shift from presence to performance. We are no longer just experiencing places — we are reproducing them. And the paradox is striking: the more we travel to see something unique, the more our behavior makes it uniform.

In Hallstatt, this wasn’t loud or chaotic. It was almost gentle. Calm - maybe because of the silencer traffic light. Beautiful, even. But beneath it, there was a pattern — a kind of soft choreography where everyone seemed to know their role without ever discussing it.

Arrive. Wait. Wait a bit impatiently. Pause. Adjust. Capture. Leave.

And in that choreography, something subtle gets lost. Not dramatically, not all at once — but gradually.

Because when your attention is split between the place and the image you are about to create, you are never fully in either.

So what are we actually collecting?

Photos, yes. Memories, not sure but hopefully. Increasingly, what we take home are not just personal moments — but versions of something that already exists thousands of times online. Places become recognizable not because we’ve experienced them, but because we’ve seen them repeated enough times. And maybe that’s the quiet shift worth noticing. Not that we take photos — but that, somewhere along the way, the photo started to take over the experience. And this raises a simple, slightly uncomfortable question:

Are we still discovering places — or just confirming what we’ve already seen? Wrote about it in my previous post, Checklist Travel - Are we visiting places or just consuming them?

References

Urry, J., & Larsen, J. (2012). The tourist gaze 3.0. SAGE Publications.

Abidin, C. (2016). Visibility labour: Engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD advertorial campaigns on Instagram. Media International Australia, 161(1), 86–100.