Travel – What’s New?

In the 170 years since the publication of the first photographically illustrated book, Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, thousands of photographers have captured millions of subjects in a myriad of different ways. Even leaving aside Photoshop, as the available technology has advanced so the way in which things that can be explored and revealed through photographed has expanded in ways that practitioners in the first 100 years could not have imagined.

Despite these new avenues there is perhaps a feeling that within the mainstream of photography (outside the technical and scientific) there is nothing new left to photograph. A landscape is still a landscape no matter how big the print; a building is still a building converging verticals or not; a portrait is still a portrait whether formal or informal; and so on. Everything becomes a variation on a theme. In Playing to the Gallery Grayson Perry says that fine art students in knowing what to do are faced by the ‘overwhelming problem of there being so many artists, galleries, possibilities, influences, techniques.’ He reflects: ‘One lad said whenever he had an idea he would google it and usually someone somewhere in the world had already done it.’ Think of a photographic subject and someone somewhere is ahead of you.

With this in mind, I offer the six derivative photographs below for readers to speculate as to who got their first.

So, turning to my proposed book, what’s the point? I don’t make any great claims for myself as a photographer, so am I just putting together a collection of variations on a theme that will be at best derivative and at worst banally imitative? That is in part the point of the preceding 11 posts, how to make a book that is worthwhile in its own right, something that goes beyond a collection of my favourite photographs, an album of holiday snaps by another name.

This does prompt some general question. What would a modern book of photographs from more or less random travels look like? What is it attempting to do? Does it need text? How literal a reflection of travel(s) does it have to be? Is ‘travel’ a red herring and is this just about the photographs? When I think about photo books that explore places and people which I admire they are more or less project based or reflect a retrospective scope, which is not my intention.

Am I over complicating this? Roy Hammans has suggested What the Traveller Saw (1989) by Eric Newby, which has a defined chronological/geographical structure and substantial accompanying texts. Bruce Chatwin – Photographs and Notebooks (1993) and Winding Paths – Photographs by Bruce Chatwin (1999) provide slightly different models that are lighter on text. Further thought is needed.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2009Photo: Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2009

 

 

 

 

Flatiron Building, New York, USA, 2011Photo: Flatiron Building, New York, America, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Lido, Venice. Italy, 2011Lido, Venice, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

Photo:Paris, France (930402-20) Paris, France, 1993

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Parque Nacionale Torres del Paine, Argentina, 2009aParque Nacionale Torres del Paine, Argentina, 2009

 

 

 

 

Ushuaia, Argentina, 2009Photo: Ushuaia, Argentina, 2009

 

 

 

 

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