Glacier Tourists: The Origins of an ‘Instagram Society’ around 1900

What makes glaciers “Instagram-able”? This question about the fascination of the cryosphere to tourists is not only related to present-day smartphone and social media society, but can be traced back to the Belle Époque, when bourgeois tourists in the Alps, in Norway or in the Rocky Mountains posed on or in front of glaciers for a photograph. This paper aims at exploring the attractiveness of glaciers to alpine tourists from the late 19th century onwards. Looking at the example of the Swiss mountains, glaciers even became the drivers to construct cog railways to altitudes never reached before. In this way, wealthy tourists could just stop near the glacier, admire a spectacular view, and pose in front of this scenery or even on the ice itself. Photographers such as Arthur Gabler from Interlaken (canton of Bern) made a big business with accompanying these tourists for a professional photo. He also sold these photographs as postcards to send them home from the Bernese Oberland. In this way, an attitude similar to our today’s “Instagram society” can be observed. Based on a visual environmental history approach using photographs, postcards and poster advertisements, this paper tries to shed a light on the development of human-glacier relationships for the last 140 years. Are there significant changes of motivation why to visit glaciers and to use them as a spectacular setting for self-representation? It is assumed that in the Belle Époque the main driver had been the admiration for the “sublime Alps” and the sparkling “wild“ ice, whereas today, in times of accelerating global warming, new aspects such as “last change tourism” might be prevalent. As an outlook, it will also be asked how this alpine tourism infrastructure constructed for glacier experiences will cope with a future, when the glaciers have shrunk or totally vanished.