Every single evening, a collective trance overcomes humanity as thousands of amateur photographers flock to the coastline, firmly convinced that they are the very first person to witness the sun dipping below the horizon. They plant their feet in the wet sand, tilt their smartphones at a slightly dramatic angle, and capture the exact same blend of yellow, orange, pink, and blue that has occurred daily for roughly four billion years. The photograph shown here beautifully showcases this eternal cliché with its sweeping clouds and shimmering wet shoreline. It is a stunning view, certainly, but it also looks like the default desktop background on every laptop sold since 2008, or the cover of a generic wellness brochure warning you about the dangers of unmanaged stress.
The true comedy of the beach sunset photo lies in the absolute uniformity of the digital landscape it populates. Social media feeds become a monolithic wall of identical horizons, where the only real variation is whether the photographer applied the “Clarendon” filter or the “Lark” filter to mask the fact that fifty other people were standing three feet to their left doing the exact same thing. They exist in a state of beautiful, endless deja vu, proving that no matter how vast the ocean is, our collective artistic vision when handed a camera at 6:00 PM is about as narrow as a boardwalk hot dog stand. We like to think we are capturing a profound, fleeting moment of cosmic beauty, but in reality, we are just participating in the world’s largest, most beautifully lit flash mob of creative conformity.
