Locals at Santiago de Atitlan, Guatemala.
Corrie Wingate/APA
A photograph has something to say – one person’s point of view interpreted through the lens. And as photographers travel, so their stories build into a library of memories that are as much about the person as the subjects they choose
We are all photographers now. It is almost impossible to travel without taking a camera, even if it’s an addendum to a mobile phone. Sales from Japanese manufacturers, which make up more than 90 percent of the world market, are running at around 100 million cameras a year, and every month three billion photos are uploaded onto Facebook, videos reach YouTube at the rate of more than 20 hours a minute, and more words and pictures are added to the 200 million existing travel blogs. Nobody thinks of travelling far without a camera, and when presented with new sights, we want to view them through a viewfinder or LCD.
Recent research by a former Latin America tour guide at the anthropology department of London University concluded that, when presented with a sight, tourists always take three photographs: (1) the sight, (2) their travelling companion(s) in front of the sight, and (3) themselves in front of the sight, taken by a companion. What they are doing, the writer concluded, is behaving like consumers: they had bought the travel experience, and they wanted to have the goods to show for it, the pictures of them with the items, material entitlement for the money spent.
For Europeans, travel and landscapes are the most popular photo subjects, accounting for around 70 percent of pictures taken, according to a Nikon poll, which also revealed that more than half of all pictures end up on-line.
Corrie Wingate/APA
But a travel photographer will want much more than this. With enthusiasm and some knowledge of photography, of the way that light and shadows work, and of how a picture is composed, he or she will want to take a photograph that not only has a “wow” factor, but also one that reveals their personal interpretation of a view, that shows a place in a particular circumstance or light.
Each image will carry the weight of the photographer’s own integrity. These pictures will be part of a chapter in their lives that other people can look at and share and even, sometimes, admire.
Our ability to take an inexhaustible number of pictures means that we can chart our experiences and adventures in detail, which build, episode by episode, into the tale of our whole life. This is photography as immortality, evidence that we have been not just to particular places, but that we have had an existence on the planet at all. Our lives can be visually documented from family occasions to the times that we were perhaps at our happiest: unknown, unencumbered, experiencing newness, just being out in the world, travelling.
Many travel photographers hope for lasting images of a dying world – of landscapes transmuting under climate change, of diminishing wildlife, changing cityscapes, anything that may not be here tomorrow. This is the traveller as witness, one of the photographer’s most important roles.
The story of a place
Ari Ghuler, a great travel photographer, has also spent his life capturing his own city, Istanbul, in a journey through time. “Life has changed,” he says. “Because they never knew the former city and cannot imagine it, the new generation today thinks that this is Istanbul, that Istanbul was always like this. When they look at one of my old photographs, they are astounded. ‘Where is that?’ they ask, because hardly anywhere still looks the same.”
Photographers deal in things that are
continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Many photogr have pet themes: road signs, architectural styles, shop windows, particular fauna or flora. Some have taken pictures of the same spot every day for a year, others mark the changes in a single day. There have been books of photographs dedicated solely to dovecotes, front doors, letterboxes, garden sheds. Whatever the theme, a focused body of work can help to develop your particular style or language. And “collecting” images can prove as addictive as collecting anything else. German travel photographer Hans Silvester is known for his stunning pictures of the highly decorated Omo people in a remote region of remote Ethiopia, but he also produced the best selling Cats of Greek Islands, followed by Kittens of the Greek Islands and Sleeping in the Sun: Carefree Cats of the Greek Islands.
LIFE: A Journey Through Time, which can be seen on-line (www.lifethroughtime.com) is an inspirational volume of photographs that interpret the history of the world through 86 wonderful nature images. Taken by Dutch-born Frans Lanting, the pictures have been presented in performance, with music composed by Philip Glass, and are a reminder that an image can go beyond print or screen into projects that involve other media.
Kevin Cummins/APA
Making memories
Photographs are a way of sharing a point of view, and of providing an aid to our physical and emotional past. We need these reminders, and have done since ancient times when a young woman from Corinth named Dibutade supposedly invented the art of drawing when her lover was about to embark on a long journey. The memory she would carry of him in her head would not be enough, so she traced his shadow on a wall so that she could look at him every day in his absence.
“Photo albums are for people without memories,” says Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the material-free jet-setter in the 2009 movie Up in the Air. But our memories cannot be trusted, and one of the many things that Bingham is missingout on is the undoubted pleasure of being able tolook at tangible evidence of a place once visited.
As picture editors will attest, we recall photographs imprecisely. Often we are convinced we have seen certain things in a picture, perhaps even one that is familiar, and yet when we look at it again, it is not exactly as we remembered it.So a photograph can be an important corrective,even to the memory of a photograph itself.
The great adventurers – Darwin, Humboldt, Hedin, and most early travel photographers –made their important journeys while they were young, and they used the memories of these adventures in later life, perhaps to write memoirs or entertain their friends, or to return to the darkroom to reprint favourite negatives. Today, there is still a good deal of adventuring in early life, and inexpensive air travel can keep us regularly on the move. But there is also a rapidly increasing band of pension-age seniors on the road with cameras. Photography and computers offer endless stimulation for retirement, and some believe that older people may achieve better results than youngsters, as they might more easily win their subjects’ confidence.
Visual stimulation
Most of all, however, a travel photographer really loves a great picture, and an appreciation of what is great is the starting point for taking good pictures. Four-fifths of the information going into our brains is visual: this is a high profile input, and when our visual senses are stimulated, the rewards are enormous. The intelligence to know what to look for, when to press the shutter and how to use the technology, is not necessarily learned at school. A surprisingly high number of photographers (Ansel Adams, David Bailey) are dyslexic, compensating a lack of ability in one form of communication by excelling in another.
The same sense of curiosity, adventure, escape and liberation that makes us travel, also makes us travel photographers. Recording, witnessing, heightening awareness, a camera is an indispensible aid to a journey. And for lone travellers with a little time on their hands, unrestrained by the demands of companions or the press of a deadline, taking pictures can be a hugely rewarding experience.