You’ve probably seen Instagram photos like it: a man in a dark hoodie stands on the edge of a building, his fashionable flyknits only inches from a plummeting drop onto the saturated night lights of a major city.If this sounds familiar, then you know about the Urbex (Urban Exploration) Instagram, which has exploded in recent years. As Adrian Chen describes in a 2014 piece for New York Magazine:A photo posted by trashhand (@trashhand) on Oct 6, 2015 at 8:12am PDT
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When urban exploration hit social media, all hell broke loose. Many mark its rise from a series of videos by Russian duo On the Roofs. This sweaty-palm, can’t-look/can’t-look-away video shows two masked figures breaking into a construction site to climb the in-progress Shanghai tower. Theo Kindynis, a PhD candidate at the University of Greenwich who has studied the media depiction of urbex, typifies the video in a 2015 article:Such representations typically depicted the protagonists (and they are very much protagonists, taking center-stage and casting themselves as fearless adventurer-heroes) scaling an under-construction skyscraper or construction crane before inevitably dangling their legs, or even singlehandedly hanging their entire body, without any safety equipment, from some concrete or steel precipice.A photo posted by T (@midnight.xpress) on Jul 21, 2015 at 6:24pm PDT
Currently working on a documentary. Just the beginning.
A photo posted by Seventeen (@unkwnvisual) on Mar 7, 2016 at 5:12pm PST
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Certainly, sewers are less popular on Instagram, and less favorable to potential sponsorship deals. Many rooftoppers are sponsored or are otherwise professional, note both Garrett and Kindynis. On the Roofs did an ad for Canon; Humza Deas, the subject of Chen’s interview, is sponsored by a sock company; and UK explorer James Kingston sells his own apparel, featuring pictures of himself on top of buildings. I asked Garrett how social media, rooftopping, and branding feed on each other. He said:A photo posted by @insighting on Feb 27, 2016 at 10:31am PST
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Certainly this seems predictable, if one considers exploration more akin to an extreme sport than an intellectual pursuit. But the real mind-numbing factor is how all of these photographs fall prey to cookie-cutter Instagrammization. Not unlike the “ruinporn” urbex spin-off, popular back in the height of the 2008-2009 recession, rooftopping all looks the same as it approaches aesthetic ideals. Shoes, dangling off of a thing, over a city. A person in a hoodie, on a bridge. It looks cool, but the faux cool of equivalence, not unlike the brands for which these Instagram celebrities now produce. What makes any of this different or meaningful from any other extreme contrast, high-saturation imagery of urbanism? Instagram rooftopping has taken something as exciting as trespassing and made it as mundane as a latte on a reclaimed wood espresso bar.A photo posted by Seventeen (@unkwnvisual) on Oct 12, 2015 at 9:15pm PDT
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