Hi all!

I’ve been overseas for 3 of the last 4 weeks (start the violins…) and having walked back through my front door covered in recycled air and full of rage about baggage handlers, I’m contemplating all things travel…

How lucky I am to do it, how amazing it is to get to see different places, how air travel can be mind bogglingly convenient and stupendously infuriating all at once, the works…

But my main reflection is one about photography, and its relationship with exploration.

Things that are novel to us will often seem more interesting than things/places with which we are familiar, but I’m finding these days that while it’s fascinating to see new places, or places new to me rather, photographing them is often a somewhat hollow experience.

I can’t break the feeling that this is because my relationship to that place is, well, hollow. I’m skimming the surface when I spend a week somewhere, I’m floating around a culture rather than immersing myself in it, pressing my shutter with what is at best a rudimentary understanding of what I’m pointing my camera at.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in recent years it has lead to a strong correlation between how close to home I was when I took a photo, and subsequently how close that photo feels to me.

I’m often asked by other photographers for advice on taking photos when they can’t travel, and this is what I typically say:

Shoot what you can, in a way others can’t. In other words, use your relationship and familiarity with your location to your advantage.
Reframe your perspective. You are interested in far flung places in a way that people in those places would likely feel about where you are. It’s perhaps boring to you because it isn’t new to you. Often when I talk to people about this stuff I head to Google street view to look at the places they’re calling boring, and if it’s new to me I’ll often think it looks fascinating.
Take heart from the fact that I’m far from the only person who seems to get the most joy out of finding photographs close to home.

I don’t know if that’s helpful to you or not, but it’s advise that I need to take onboard myself now more than ever, as from today I’ll be staying at home for a good while waiting for our second child to arrive, and then after they’re born I’ll be a canvas to be vomited on for several months at least before I’m back on the move.

Admittedly, I live close to a National Park and the coast, I’m lucky in that regard. But I plan to use this time to hopefully see beauty in the familiar, rather than to constantly lust for the exotic.

Speak soon,

James

My complicated relationship with travel photography

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