High culture: presentations of the self in mountain environments

This article examines the convergence of amateur and professional documentary practice, particularly photographic self-portraiture, as it is performed on the mountainside. It uses a tight selection of examples drawn from the community of hillwalkers known as ‘Wainwrighters’ to examine the phenomenon of ‘produsage’ (Bruns 2008).

While the world of digitally co-created artefacts may seem a distance away from the top of a mountain, I argue here that high peaks and mountain tops are no more immune from the influence of social media than any other space. In this context, the article seeks to answer a series of questions relating to the practice of taking ‘summit selfies’: What do the self-made digital artworks produced by walkers, and disseminated in tight-knit online communities of mountain hikers, look like? What is it about the mountains that provokes such forms of mediatized self-expression? And how do artefacts evolve and transform, to form ‘palimpsests’ as Axel Bruns terms the outputs of produsage? These questions are discussed in relation to three main examples sited in the Lake District National Park in England: Karen’s Forster’s 214 Headstands, my own celebration of ‘Completion’ on the peak of Pillar; and Charlotte Mellor’s #HoopingtheWainwrights project.

The article concludes by repositioning the selfie as a collective creative act and challenging its popular representation as an expression of youthful selfishness.