On Being Sidetracked.

Today I was thinking back to the 2½ weeks I spent in Toronto doing a travel shoot for a publisher. I remembered having the same problem as I had whenever I was confronted with the need to photograph any strange town or city: I found it hard to concentrate on the reason for being there.

I would walk the streets, or the precincts of a museum or art gallery or shopping mall – whatever was on the publisher’s list of required locations – and my mind would be constantly consumed with the need to bypass the physical surface of the place and instead search for the sense of it. Photographs don’t reveal the sense of a place – its essence or energy or call it what you will – any more than a snapshot of a person reveals that person’s inner self. Getting to grips with the sense of a place requires a perceptual faculty far subtler than mere physical observation.

Eventually I would realise that I had entered a kind of reverie and pull myself out of it, and then I could use my eyes and the viewfinder to find the shapes and colours and interrelated forms which the average tourist would find attractive. And the concept of gainful employment would reassert itself.