Vacations can be stressful.
It's not that I don't relax or enjoy myself. I absolutely do. But vacations carry a strange duality that is difficult for me to reconcile as a photographer. On one hand, I find myself visiting new exciting places with unique architecture, history, landmarks, people, cultures, and the swath of photographic opportunities that come with those things. On the other hand, you're also visiting a space that you are not familiar with, don't necessarily understand, and are typically having an experience that typically carry this pressure to photograph them for the memories instead of for the sake of creating "good" photos. Additionally, when you're visiting well known places, you lose many of your creative options because they're either crowded, or otherwise have controls in place that make the photographic process less flexible.
I visited New York City for the first time this past weekend; which, side-note, is sort of wild considering I've lived within a stone's throw of the city for my entire life, but I digress. While I was there, I was of course enthralled with the looming buildings, historic sites, and the overwhelming nature of that space. There was, after all, an incredible amount to photograph in one of the most famous cities on Earth. At the same time though, I was traveling with companions whom I wanted to capture the trip with, and being as it was my first time in the city, much of my trip was focused on the more "touristy" attractions that a seasoned New Yorker may not have paid any mind to. Additionally, an element of my experience as a photographer is becoming comfortable in a space that I am photographing. While this tends to happen quickly, it's something that compounds when overwhelmed with new stimulus and opportunities, especially when mixed with the limitations present in a space like this.
A good example is atop the Empire State Building. This is a well known building in the heart of the city that offers incredible views from one side of Manhattan to the other. It's also a highly controlled space with a designated process for those who visit, and with safety measures in place to prevent unfortunate occurrences. For instance, on the 86th floor there is an observation deck that is both crowded and completely enclosed by metal fencing. This makes it difficult to photograph the cityscape with any foreground elements present, lest your image also contain this latticed metal.
Along with the physical obstructions that exist in these conditions, there are also emotional elements to an experience like this that changes how I approached creating images in this space. The first of the two is the hyper-awareness of the "touristy" nature of my images. I didn't want to simply photograph the cityscape, as thousands of people do every day. I wanted my own photographic eye to shine through, just as it does with my other imagery. The other element to this, as I mentioned before, is traveling with companions whom you want to remember the trip with. So my approach to photographing this space adapted to these things.
Firstly, my images couldn't focus on the city as the subject, except for those that were simply "I want to remember this" kinds of images. Second, I wanted to capture candid moments of my companions experiencing that space. So, this trip became about allowing myself to take the silly and maybe artistically meritless sentimental photos, while also adjusting my approach to how I took the photos that I feel have artistic merit. It became a study of movement and scale in the city, as well as an exercise in street photography, focusing on how those I was with experienced that landscape.
In the end, I walked away with both sentimental images, and those that I would share as part of a larger piece of work. More importantly, I walked away with a better understanding that vacation photography doesn’t need to be reduced to either snapshots or serious work. Sometimes the right mindset is simply allowing both to exist: the photographs that preserve the trip, and the photographs that interpret it.
