Travel

Travel photography is mostly about being a stranger and using it. You do not know the place, which means you still notice things the people who live there stopped seeing years ago — a doorway, a colour combination, the way a street empties at a particular hour.I shoot cities on foot and early.

Find the composition first, hold it, and let someone walk into the space you left for them.

Light is better, streets are emptier, and people are going about a morning rather than performing for a lens. The photographs that survive a trip are almost never the landmark.

They are the small unrepeatable ones: a shopfront, a queue, a shaft of light between two buildings at eight in the morning. Wait for a frame to complete itself.

I walk a street once before I photograph anything on it. The second pass is the useful one — by then I know where the light lands and which corner people cut through. I go out in bad weather. Empty streets and wet stone do half the work.

If I want someone close, I ask, and I take no for an answer. Mostly I'd rather go back to the same block on a different morning than chase somewhere new. A place gets more interesting the second and third time, not less.

The instinct is to photograph what's famous, because famous things are already framed for you. Somebody else did the composition and I'd just be standing where they stood. The pictures that hold up are usually the ones you couldn't have looked up first — a doorway, a bus window, a man arranging fruit in a way that only happens there.

None of this requires a plane ticket, either. The reason a stranger sees more is attention, not distance. I get the same thing out of Miami and Fort Lauderdale when I walk them like I just arrived.