Explanation To start off this next group of pictures, let's talk about travel. Obviously, coming from a point of privilege, I do enjoy travelling. As I'm writing this, I just read an article on The New Yorker titled "The case against travel".

The premise of the article is that travel is largely an excuse to go places and search for "change" without meaningfully undergoing personal change. The quote they use is "Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community." The idea being that tourists leave their mark on the communities they visit but not really the other way around. In that way, I do actually agree. Fundamentally, tourism is not symmetrical. As the tourist, you have the power to decide where to go and what to do. As a collective whole, through reviews and aggregate behavior, the host communities change as a result of the whims and wants of the tourists.

The author goes on to explain a trip to Abu Dhabi and how they went to a falcon hospital and how it was precipitated by reviews but not by any particular passion. Of equal measure is the hordes of people who go to see the Mona Lisa or the Grand Canyon, not because of real interest but to "experience" it as a thing to do.

They also explain how travel differs from your normal life and how you tend to walk or move in ways you normally wouldn't. Also they note "you say to yourself the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life."

Here's where I find my way of travel a bit different. My goal in travel is to view a new and different space with the same sort of eyes I use on a day to day basis. While yes, I do go places I normally wouldn't and do things I normally wouldn't, they're all in service of trying to broaden my vision. But additionally, I do a lot of similar things to when I'm home. Starting around the pandemic, I started wandering around more often during walks and I find it really enjoyable to move around somewhat aimlessly. So when I travel, I make full use of my time to meander and see things. I've noted in the past that I love "spaces" and while I probaly won't talk about many in the upcoming posts, I often found myself wandering and stopping to look at a space. In that way, I take my daily life and apply it to my travel life while allowing the new place to dictate the pace and style of my vision. I often don't try and rush to do things while travelling because to me, the being there and the absorbing of my thoughts and emotions are the most important thing, not necessarily what exactly I'm doing.

One of the final points made in the article is that "Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started." To that point, I don't necessarily disagree. But perhaps the point is too extreme. Should we be asking for such transformative and personality disintegrating experiences? The idea that we need to fundamentally change after travel is, to me, deeply disturbing. Ultimately, I seek change in my life because I don't want to be the same. However, that doesn't mean I want to be entirely different. No, I want to be subtly and mildly affected. I want a mild broadening of horizons, a marked but not altogether foreign shift in perspective. The idea of transformative change is largely a fantasy and the things that cause them are not things we want with any meaningful regularity.

A big part of this site and these posts is to mark how I change how I think and view myself and the world through my photography. This is not altogether removed from how I perceive and experience the world in aggregate. As a result, I really want to focus on this idea that change is both possible and wanted. However, to assume that change will happen because you say you want it but make no meaningful attempt at it is really silly. It's also inherently lazy. Perhaps that's what the author is really getting at. That we foist upon travel this idea that it's supposed to, through sheer planning and doing, fundamentally change us and how we see the world without having to do or spend the effort to understand what it is we're trying to change. And quite frankly, with that sort of intention, it's clear that people won't change. There's no thought or purpose towards changing, even subtly.

Anyways, that was a really long winded and ultimately really pointless response to an article I read. Let's talk about this pair of pictures, the return of the frog.

While I've been carrying this fella around in my backpack the past year, I haven't really taken many pictures of them since getting them back at Palo Duro Canyon. I'll definitely have more pictures of them in the following months, but it's one of those things that I don't always spend effort thinking about.

Honestly, these two pictures aren't that interesting. They're actually very similar to the ones I posted back in that first post of frog and whale. In a way, these are the pictures of me in a place. The frog is very much my avatar and these are very much the most tourist-y pictures, the most vacation-y.

I won't really talk about the place these were taken. Suffice it to say I was at Sydney Park in Sydney Australia. The rest is a bit unimportant.

In both cases I really like the vertical spacing and composition. They're pretty simplistic, the first one being a pretty simple grouping in thirds, platform then frog and sculpture then sky. The second being a bit more of a half/half type of picture with the sky taking up half and the rest the other. The interesting part here being that the city skyline in the background is about halfway up the height of the frog and it all fits pretty well in that little triangle created by the upturned frog and the wooden pole it's on.

I'll be talking about more pictures from this trip to Sydney, but I think I'll be a bit less focused on the stories of my time there. In a way I want to protect those stories and keep them more to myself than broadcast them to an audience, regardless of whether anyone's reading. While yes, this is a space for me and I really don't care if people read it, nor do I expect anyone to, I also want to keep some of my stories to myself. That said, I do want to talk about the pictures and the unrelated stuff can be left a bit to the side.