#benjamin hardman

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Walking on water.

"After reaching the sea ice at 82° North, we came across this young male Polar Bear riding the storm swells and navigating effortlessly through a maze of pack ice. One of the most incredible sights I’ve witnessed in the Arctic. Watch until the end to see the power of the swell moving beneath the ice.

A wolf in the cage watches a simulation of the wild

Tourist trade self-directed engagement, the full-bodied, sensory, causal immersion in life for pre-packaged experiences that someone else organizes. In doing so, they surrender agency. They no longer shape time, space, or activity according to their own needs and rhythms, but consume what is offered, like passive children.

The subtlety is that the packaged experience feels like freedom or novelty, but structurally it’s dependence. The mind is fed images and expectations rather than forming adequate ideas through interaction with the world. Autonomy, risk, and real sensory understanding are replaced with convenience, safety, and a controlled illusion of experience. It is a voluntary surrender of life’s “raw material” in exchange for spectacle.

It’s a projection: the wolf in the cage watches a simulation of the wild and thinks it is participating, while the reality, the raw, untamed, uncontrolled world is luckily inaccessible.

Many tourists still believe that going on safari means witnessing authentic native dances for just ten dollars. In reality, these performances are often put on by hired ethnic dance groups. After the show, the dancers change out of their costumes and retreat to their air-conditioned huts, where they relax with plasma TVs and watch movies about Wall Street. And who is the bigger attraction, dancers for tourists or the other way around?

Benjamin Hardman, Iceland (2019)

Iceland

Benjamin Hardman

“A blue morph Arctic fox roaming in the winter snow.“