Travel – People and Places

Embracing ‘both people and places’ is something else I’m trying to achieve with my travel photo book. It is important to recognise at the outset that the way the photographs were taken (largely on holidays) and the aspiration to bring together in a coherent way material collected over 30 years means that this cannot be any kind of social documentary. It is not possible to say anything very meaningful about the human condition. I also have an antipathy to carefully lit and composed portraits of people, ‘characters’ as local colour sitting in isolation from any context.

However, people, and encounters with them, are an essential part of the travel experience: they are important in their own right and shape identity and sense of place. The inclusion of a person or people may:
– Result in a telling image of that person or people
– Reveal the culture of a place
– Reveal activities that occour in the place
– Show how a space or place is used
– Provide scale to the natural or built environment
– And so on.

Photo: Jardin du Luxemnourg, Paris, 1992

Photo: Place de l’Ecole Militaire, Paris, 1988

Photo: Zanzibar International Airport, 1999

Photo: Hurmuzi, Stone Town, Zanzibar, 1999

Photo: Mount Blanc, Chemonix, 2008

Photo: Quai du Louvre, Paris, 1988