What Is Travel Photography?

Where It Came From, What It Means Today

In a recent article, I said, “I want to get the best possible pictures I can when I’m spending a lot of money to go somewhere I may never see again.” That was my rationale for taking higher-end gear, not just my iPhone, along on my trip around Spain this April.

One commenter brought me up short.

He said, “If this is really true, you are better off buying the photo books of the places you go — the ones where professional photographers make all the photos … Then, you will have more time to actually experience the place you spent so much money to get to and might get to experience only once.” He went on to describe his own experience at Grand Canyon, taking hundreds of pictures, but afterward not even remembering being there.

He certainly has a point. It has caused me to backtrack my thinking over the past week of our trip around the south of Spain. I began to think about what travel photography even is.

Where Did Travel Photography Come From?

People didn’t travel for personal purposes until religious pilgrimages began, probably as early as the 4th century, but later on a relatively major scale in medieval times. The idea of leaving home to go elsewhere on a personal mission is recent, at least by the standards of the long history of homo sapiens. We have Chaucer and other poets to recount these early explorations in our own culture, but…