The Sightseer

Rather than the tourist who tours, the traveler who looks and listens. Going to unknown places, meeting new people, curious to understand how they see their world. Noticing what is different. To the stranger the world is new and astonishing. At the crossroads of ethnography, beauty, and the wondrous.

The travelogue as literature records the people, events, sights and feelings of an author who is touring a foreign place for the pleasure of travel. To be called literature, travel writing must have a coherent narrative or insights and value. 

As travel writing may be literature, travel photography can aspire to  poetry or art. Personal reflections, impressions, the desire to communicate, the ability to formulate these, where a trip becomes the occasion for extended observations on a nation and people.

Travel photography was important a century ago when so few had the opportunity. Today everyone is a photographer especially when they are traveling. Does the camera then become a substitute for looking, feeling, experiencing, a way to appropriate the world and take it home? Or a way to remain at home looking at the pictures in the living room?