'Selfies' at the WTC Memorial?

[girlinacoma]

Selfie sticks and groups of people saying '1-2-3 cheeeeese'?

I've visited twice now and found the first visit really compelling but strangely unemotional. For some reason, I found the second visit much more moving and sobbed quietly away as the enormity of it all hit me.

I get that people will react differently and experience different emotions but a group of 8 or so middle-aged Americans pulling funny faces and doing rabbit ears for a selfie is a bit much - no?

I have raging PMT by the way, so totally prepared to be told I'm being unreasonable.

People really fuck me off though sometimes.

It is so moving and the museum even more so.

Girl the white roses are to mark birthdays of the victims. Beautiful gesture I think.

Didn't Obama take some during Nelson Mandela's funeral? A great example !

YANBU - DD and I went last October and even she (a 16yo teen) was horrified that people were taking selfies. I found it hugely emotional and found the selfie taking so disrespectful - how upsetting for those who lost loved ones.

People can be idiots. We had the same shock at Hiroshima, very disrespectful selfies going down and when they couldn't get the angle and asked me to take it they had tge nerve to be put out when i said no!

The white roses are placed by memorial staff next to the names of people whose birthday it would have been that day girlinacoma. I was equally horrified by the selfie-takers.

I reckon if it was in the UK, there would be all manner of flowers and plastic tat stuck in the names.

Didn't Obama take some during Nelson Mandela's funeral? A great example !

You mean the one he took with David Cameron at a memorial service full of people singing, dancing and stamping?

See I'm on the fence here

Selfies at places like the WTC and Auswitz(sp) on the face of it sounds very disrespectful

On the flip side it's no different from people posing and having someone else take the photo.

It's acknowledging the place you are at and reminding yourself what horrors there are in the world

We didn't see anything like that when were there. It was all very calm and everyone was dignified. The fountains are beautiful. We explained to dd about the white roses and she went around touching the names and saying Happy Birthday. I like to think the relatives would have liked that.

I went to visit before the museum opened. We had pictures taken by the memorial but it wasn't done in a 'say cheese' kind of way. Mainly candid shots of us looking at the names etc.

I couldn't imagine being all smiley while there. It was a very sobering place.

I think selfies/having other people take your photo at Auschwitz would be extremely macabre and disrespectful. I found it a very distressing place

I went to WTC before it had all been rebuilt on a school trip to NYC - there was a small memorial there but really it was like a building site (they were building the new tower - this was 2009) and thankfully there was no-one taking selfies. We all took pictures and I'll be honest it was the part of the trip I'd been looking forwards to the most, because we'd studied it in depth in school as part of Media Studies and I'd done so much research for projects etc.

The emotion of it all just blindsided us. I don't think I'd ever felt such overwhelming emotion before (I was 15) - although much of it looked like a building site it was still such a strong feeling of what had happened there. We'd all been typical teenagers for much of the New York trip but we were all totally silent during that tour. The FDNY memorial in particular is the part that has stuck with me ever since. On 9/11 I was 6 and I think seeing the memorial hammered it home that it was something that really actually happened, not just something in films and documentaries.

My DD was in the Louvre, last week. She said so many people, especially the young uns, were just taking selfies in front of the pictures. Girls doing the silly fish-face thing. Then sat in the middle of the room uploading them to the net. No interest in the paintings at all.

Just 'here is me!!!!'

I don't think that's anything new in the history of art galleries though - there have always been complaints about people going to be seen rather than to see art and I suppose this is just the latest incarnation of that!

YANBU

Look at this moron

I don't mind selfies in galleries. Possibly irritating but not offensive.

I went to the memorial in 2014 and felt emotionally drained by the time we left, I cried listening to the voice recordings and again reading all of the names around the waterfall outside and just felt wrung out by the horror of it. What goes through your mind when you decide to take a smiling selfie somewhere like that??

Definitely not unreasonable. I haven't been to WTC but witnessed tourists with selfie sticks at Dachau. I don't understand how anyone can possibly think it is appropriate. I was also shocked at the number of people (teenagers and fully grown adults) climbing on the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. I was walking through the centre of the memorial and someone jumped out and shouted boo (playing a game of hide and seek). Disgusting.

Bloody hell (MadameDePompom's post) what a retard! RE: The Louvre thing, its not that it's disrespectful of the art or the artists, it's just why go if the objective is to take photo's of yourself? They're in front of some of the greatest artistic achievements in the history of mankind and all they want to see is a large percentage of themselves.

very interesting listen on the subject