Travel & Humanitarian Photos
One of the main aims of my photo workshops and tours is to encourage participants to appreciate the culture of the location that they are visiting. If travel photography, for want of a better term, is about anything, it must surely be about communicating an experience. Travel broadens the mind, anyone who has ever stepped off a plane in an unfamiliar destination knows this, but the crucial thing is to open yourself up to the experience before anything else.
To my mind, travel photography should be concerned with capturing some of the joy and delight found when visiting cultures different from one’s own. I started taking pictures in order to record my travel experiences and photography is the most convenient, most immediate way for me to record my journeys, my experiences and my interactions. If I didn’t own a camera, I’d still travel. Sure, I’d learn to sketch or paint or find some other way to capture those memories but the point is that photography is a secondary consideration. It’s the experience that comes first.
Sadly, this isn’t the case for everyone. Too often these days I encounter photographers who are merely trophy hunters. In fact, to call them photographers is to diminish the term. More leisure time, greater disposable income, more affordable camera equipment and cheaper flights has opened the world up to a small but rather irritating group whose sole concern is to snatch something from the places they visit and to get back to the safety and security of the nearest 7-11 before they’re forced to breath in too much of the local air.
Am I being a little harsh? Perhaps. A little holier than thou? Possibly. Is it an inevitable consequence of the world we live in today? I guess so. We see gorgeous images of exotic locations all the time in advertising, on TV, in travel supplements and tour brochures. Perhaps it’s understandable that people begin to confuse capturing a picture of the Taj Mahal for the experience of standing beside it, soaking up the magnificence of that improbable architecture and enjoying the enchanting, romantic atmosphere that is inescapable in that location. Would it be ridiculous to suggest that cameras should be banned for first-time visitors to such locations? Wouldn’t our experience of a destination be improved, enhanced and enriched if we were forced to actually stand and stare instead of simply trying to snatch a tiny frame in a digital sensor? Wouldn’t our subsequent photography be so much better if we’d taken the time to really look at our subject, to understand it, to watch the way the light falls upon it and too see how the shape of it alters as we move around and change our perspective? I think so and I know that many others agree. Thankfully.
This short tirade is prompted by watching our Bhutan Photo Expedition team in action for the past two weeks. They were the very opposite of the kind of behaviour I’m complaining about. Sure, I gave my “you’ve got to have the experience before you can photograph it” speech at the beginning of the tour but I was really preaching to the choir. Which was fortunate as I’d lost my voice and am not sure any of them even heard me. Throughout our time in Bhutan, each member of our group demonstrated their willingness to soak up the local atmosphere and to experience the local culture before trying to steal something from it. And it can feel like theft, I think. I bristle when I see tourists taking photographs of people without even asking permission. Some of us step off the plane and act as if we’ve arrived in Disneyland, snapping frames of local residents as if they’ve been dressed up in costume entirely for our benefit. Without some kind of interaction, some kind of exchange, these tourists are merely stealing. Sure, I know, it’s a thin line and it’s easy to criticise but, well, perhaps it’s easy to criticise because there’s much to be critical of.
This started out as an introduction to a short video we made at Gangrithang Primary School in Bhutan. Not sure how I got waylaid into that diatribe but there you go, it’s a hot topic for me right now.
In an effort to make some small contribution to the community whose hospitality we enjoyed in Bhutan and at the prompting of our group participants, we arranged to visit a local school. We took gifts of pens, pencils and notebooks and made a small donation to the coffers. We hope that the school will be able to purchase essential equipment and the Principal explained that our gifts would be used as prize incentives for the students.
It wasn’t much but it was perhaps the start of an ongoing relationship. Before we return to Bhutan, we’ll be asking the Principal what other equipment the school could benefit from and our future trips will, I hope, include a visit from a small delegation and part of the proceeds from our tour will form a further contribution to the school. This is something that will form part of all my future photo tours and workshops and I feel it’s important that we don’t just just fly in, take great photos and fly out again without a further thought for the people whose lives we have interrupted.
So, finally, here’s a short video taken at Gangrithang Primary School in Jakar, eastern Bhutan. The staff and pupils were enormously hospitable and welcomed myself and two of our group with great glee. We kept the numbers down to minimise disruption and stayed just a short while, enjoying the morning assembly where the pupils sing the Bhutanese National anthem and then the first class of the day. Young Mark Wideman had thoughtfully brought along a pack of origami paper and held a class of students in rapt attention as he described how to make a crane from a square of paper. It was a joy to visit the school and a treat to spend a short time in the company of such polite, respectful and studious children. I can’t wait to return.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sometimes I just want to yell at tourists to put down their cameras and simply BE wherever it is that they’ve travelled around the world to be. It’s as if they travel for the sole purpose of returning home the victor, with the photographic spoils to show their friends, families and colleagues how wonderfully cosmopolitan they are. Only, far too often, they don’t even know what they’ve photographed. They literally have photos of buildings in places, people in buildings and people in places – of which they can identify absolutely nothing. They photograph empty memories. Well, I don’t want my comment to become a diatribe of its own. I’d just like to see photography used as a form of, even excuse for, engagement and not as a wall of separation between cultures
First up, great video!! Those kids and I from your words I imagine yourselves too, loooked like they shared some really great moments of the kind that are truly pricless and last a lifetime in the memory. Sometimes simplicity is the greatest idea the most pleasurable gift.
I think I mentioned to you in Swanage that one of my ‘problems’, of which I have many lol, is that whenever I go to a place I feel like a kid in a sweetshop. I have preconceptions of what I will find, what I want to shoot, etc, etc, and it takes me an age if at all to get my head around actually ‘seeing’ what is in front of me. I thought that was just me and inexperience until I heard David talking about the same thing, but I also think about when i’m in Manchester and Belgrade and the difference in the way I see things there. Belgrade sets my heart on fire, Manchester is the same thing i’ve seen for over 40 years of my life.
It makes me think that you’re right when you say it’s a thin line and the only real difference is perhaps a kind of respect for that which is outside of yourself. The desire not to see your own self as the only important thing, the realisation of yourself as a small part of a greater whole. If that’s true, it’s a philosophy for life as well as photography and certainly something we as photographers/ambassadors can help to show.
Good work m8′
& regards
So well said Gavin, agree so much with your comments about the experience being more important than the images. I have only had the chance to do a little photography in other countries, but the principle is exactly the same for my field of photography. I do mainly landscape photography in the Highlands of Scotland, and my images are the result of years building up a relationship with the area, land, nature of the place. Much of that involves putting the camera away and just experiencing the place. If I didn’t have a camera I would still explore and experience this amazing place. So, when ‘photographers’ pull up at the famous viewpoints, jump out their cars, snap, snap then on to the next famous place, they are missing the point. I believe great images, whether landscape or travel, are made from showing something of the relationship between the photographer and the place/people. Great blog Gavin!
Well, I think you’re right and you’re wrong. You’re right in the part about understanding and soaking in the culture, but we very often underestimate everyone else, and dissalow them the things we allow ourselves. Photography isn’t a religion, and although it should have its protagonists, images are something dear to most people, snapshooters or not. People pay to get to places, they soak things in in different ways and it is very difficult to say who can and who can’t.
What you touch upon is whether one should allow tourists at all. What bugs me aren’t the photograpers, but the groups always blocking the line of vision, always standing tightly together and following a guide who gives them three minutes at each stop, never allowing undestandin to sink in.
Well said and a lesson that should be practiced at home as well. Respect! earned by giving the same, then and only then deserved in return. You are being a little to kind in my opinion.
Hmmm… guilty as charged. Probably. Though I do tend to immerse myself in the experience more when it’s just me and my camera and I don’t have the wife and kids in tow.
Smashing video. Loved it.
Loved the video concept. The mix of video and stills worked really well. What is the piece of music at the start of the film? I really liked it.
Interesting comment to which I mostly agree. I think contributing factors to people firing away without interacting with locals are shortage of time – the tour group being whizzed around by the guide, and the advent of digital cameras, and camera phones. In film days not only did fewer people have cameras, the amount of frames on a film dictated more judicious use.
Gavin, thanks for sharing this video. those kids are delightful. life the background music a lot too.
What a great post. I feel the same way about immersing myself in the place, which slows me down and gets me better photos.
However when I’m traveling with friends, they find me so slow in moving around haha! I find myself wandering off and getting left behind from the group. I should travel more by myself or with a photo buddy or two.
I loved the feel of the video, wonderful stuff. Thanks for sharing Gavin!
Greetings from the Philippine Islands,
Diego
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Diatribe or not it needs saying, and when it comes from yourself, Jeffrey etc it has far more resonance.
I have noticed here in Egypt that if you behave like a tourist you get treated like a tourist. Every approach is reciprocated with a hand asking for cash. It is a sort of “if you want to exploit me then I am only to happy to exploit you” sort of exchange.
But if you stop, get engaged and act as a human being and show a real interest, compassion and respect it becomes a different world. It starts with a smile, the offer of a cup of tea and before you know it you have passed an hour or two, hand gesturing your way through a conversation. And the reward…sometimes its a photo, but even if not it is a deeper understanding of their world through their eyes.
And most times a quick print on a Pogo printer and you are in danger of being adopted and chided if you miss a weekly visit thereafter!
Where possible I always go back and take them some printed photos, or some tea or something they can’t get.
And of course by stopping, observing and listening you listen with your eyes and your ears….and that’s when the magic happens (or in my case where my technique results in a lost iconic image!)
Great post – thank for taking the time to share with such passion
PS I Posted on my blog about your upcoming workshops and used your header image to link to your site. Let me know if you want it changed