One of the principle joys of travel is the personal discovery of something new within our world. New sights and sounds, tastes and textures, peoples and animals, geographies and customs; the nature of each trip varies, but this motivation to discover something new is one of the core impulses that drives traveling for pleasure, whether visiting new destinations or revisiting old favourites.

While there is some precedent for this — witness the millennia of humans roaming the earth in search of food, land, and eventually other peoples to conquer — I find it likely that this desire has manifested itself as a reaction to the pressures of daily life, aided through the rise in travel’s accessibility over the last few generations. Experiencing the rhythms of a different place provides a welcome respite from everyday stresses, replacing them with the thrill of adventure or the tranquility of relaxation and the entire range in between.

Yet when we travel, we bring with us the mental baggage of our own ideas and perspectives that define the framework of our trip. This baggage is shaped by who we are, where we grew up and who we grew up with, what our gender, race and sexual orientation is, our political and religious perspectives, our knowledge of history, science, the arts or other academic areas, as well as our specific interests and values. Travel is a universal impulse, but it’s something that each of us experiences in a different way.

Yet within each individual experience, there are a few commonalities that exemplify the reasons why we travel, how our chosen destinations affect us, and how we affect the places we visit. We hold certain preconceptions, which inevitably colours our reactions to the trips we take; we also have our own standards of authenticity, which further affects our judgments of a new place; the change in our physical and geographical context pushes us to notice certain things we may not otherwise see; we are somehow more open to noticing the serendipitous moments that occur in front of us when we travel; and finally, traveling clarifies our notions of home and how we can best balance the desire to travel with the one to nest.

The exploration of these broader themes and their ramifications forms the spine of this piece, accompanied by a series of related photographs that I shot while living and traveling through Europe over the course of nine months in 2013/2014.

So, what’s my story and personal context that defined my experience and prompted me to even create this photo/essay in the first place?

I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, an only child of divorced, white, non-church-going middle-class parents (Canadian mother with English roots, English father) with two step-parents and two step-siblings. During the second half of 2013 and the first half of 2014, I spent six months living in Berlin and three more traveling through Europe with nothing but a backpack and a camera. I was 26/27 years old and working as a freelance art director, so it wasn’t exactly another addition to the get-wasted-and-hostel-hop canon of trips frequented by the early-twentysomething set. In addition, I had been shooting on a semi-serious level for ten years by this point, primarily focused on street photography.

Spending that much time alone with my thoughts as my primary company and source of entertainment, I gradually noticed that I kept asking myself a few questions. It started with idly wondering why we travel, but quickly moved beyond that to wondering how travel affects us, and how we impact the places we visit. When I moved to Europe, I had no thesis or even area of consideration; I was simply moving as part of a broader life change. But as I spent the majority of my time when I wasn’t working walking around and shooting, these questions evolved into the several areas of consideration which form this piece, and they subconsciously shaped what I shot. I could sense the evolution of thought, as I was constantly considering — but not forcing an answer about — the reasons why I was drawn to what I was seeing, why it was reverberating with me, and why and how I was deciding to shoot the things I did in the way I shot them.

While the subject matter — street — aligned with my existing interests within photography, I simultaneously and consciously shifted my approach to create a challenge for myself in response to my surroundings.

Europe is a familiar entity to many people for countless different reasons. With this in mind, I attempted to photograph these images in the most relatable way possible in order to ground it in a style that would feel familiar to my assumption of the typical North American reader. I shot in black and white, using a fixed-lens rangefinder, and I was almost exclusively dedicated to using the street as the setting and subject. I wanted this project to act as a considered counterbalance to the highly-filtered, highly-saturated, bubbly veneer of images that live on the social networks of Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, et al.

From this base, I adopted an approach to subject matter, framing and timing that depended entirely on serendipity. Supporting some of the thoughts that were running through my head, this “come what may” methodology factored into my decisions about where I would travel and for how long I would stay in each place as much as it shaped what I shot.

When we travel, we do so many things differently than when we are at home. There is a tension between the objective reality of a place and the subjective reality of our experience of that place. The things we love the most about travel are a product of our own brains, prompted by the excitement and wonder of new surroundings, but we tend to lose this perspective as soon as we return to the familiar rhythms and surroundings of daily life. Yet by opening our eyes to the moments of serendipity, beauty and humanity that surround us at home, we can imbue our daily lives with the same depth that we often associate with travel.

With travel occupying such a prominent role in our personal goals, communal hopes and financial considerations, I was drawn to investigate this tension through simple observation, using photography as a visual support to my written conclusions that’s as rooted in my own personal “where” and “when” as it is in the overarching themes.