In Defense of Butt Shots

A lot has changed in climbing. There's plenty of crusty and dusty old dudes on mountain project giving you a million variations of that same lament. Now, I'd like to embrace my inner curmudgeon and add to that growing and futile cacophony -- except instead of bemoaning the proliferation of bolts, the pilfering of land access, and the exploding population growth of gym rats, I want to talk about "butt shots."

Russ on "Cashmere" at Palisades Park

 

 

Remember the glory days of overly edited and poorly enhanced butt shot climbing photos? When your (hopefully non-belaying) friend would snag a phone camera photo from the ground of you on your route? It was an equalized, democratic, even Jeffersonian ideal of climbing photography. We were all the same out there, and online.

myself on "Sacbrood Virus" at the RRG

But now it seems like every recreational climber has a personal photographer jugging up an adjacent line snagging radical top-down action shots with fancy cameras and professional editing programs to bless their followers' feeds. Every instagram post looks like a curated photo from Rock and Ice instead of, you know, you and your friends just out having a good time in the woods.

Julia at the Small Wall at the Obed

Climbing photography has gotten bougie, elitist, and exclusive.

Media outlets like REI make it very clear, they want NO MORE BUTT SHOTS. Climbing Magazine wants you to go "Beyond the Butt Shot." And Mountain Project even asks you, before even uploading a photo, to reconsider uploading a posterior picture to their data base.

Andrew pulling through the roof of "Wild Pink" at T-Wall

Well, I'm sick of action shots from the top and side. I'm tired of having an elitist aesthetic forced down my throat by the burgeoning bourgeois of drone operated climbing photographers. The vast majority of us will never know what it's like to climb with an Andrew Burr or a ladylockoff but we still have memories to share. We are climbing photography's proletariat and we will not be ashamed of our posts.

Camera-phone-butt-shot climbing photographers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your "likes!"

/rant