The photographic motivation that I experienced in my time in the Pilbara kicked into a higher gear when I travelled overseas for the first time in 1977, during my mid-course gap year. I found a whole world of sights that I wanted to record to show to my family and friends back home.
First I went back up north to earn some more money, sold my Kombi, then I flew to Singapore and on through Moscow to London.
I had a sudden exposure to new cultures, beginning with the tropical shock of Singapore, where I came across this ritual taking place in a back street. Yes, those skewers are piercing the flesh on his arms, and the bloke in the background has a sword through his cheek. This was no tourist event, it was local people following their own culture. To a young bloke from the suburbs of Perth, a scene like this was eye-opening. Having the photo available to me now is a reminder of the newness of these worlds to me as a young traveller.
I splurged on colour slide film (by my frugal standards) and took lots of photos. Like the Broome trip, it would turn out that I would not visit again for a long time. You will have to wait until 2004 rolls around to see my next photos of Europe.
I hitchhiked around England and Ireland, then crossed into France. I turned 21 in Paris. I travelled on down to Spain, across to Italy and into Switzerland.
Everywhere I went, I could point my camera at something interesting and record something that the people back home had not seen. To Susan Sontag, I was behaving quite predictably: “Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” In reviewing photos for 50TTL, I may have become a tourist in my own reality. By blogging my photos, perhaps I am inviting blog readers also to become tourists in my reality.
No doubt I shot a lot of photographic clichés. But if you are there and you have a camera, what else are you going to do? I enjoyed photographing the clichés and the off-beat. Of course, I lived a life as well, experiencing many things that I did not photograph. Many of those memories live on for me without photos, like seeing snow for the first time in Moscow, the taste of poteen in Ireland, a touch of snow at the top of the Eiffel Tower, driving on the right-hand side of the road for the first time, pate de campagne, real croissants.
Among my early efforts at travel photography, a few shots still please me. I like the composition and sense of a past era in the shot of an older couple in Spain, framed by bullfighting posters on a bus shelter.
I also like the man with the briefcase and umbrella at Opera Plage in Nice. The image is a nice alternative view of a tourist hotspot. I had driven in the day before when the sun was out and the beach was crammed with beautiful bodies. Next day, this.
Here is a travel pic that you don’t get any more. I took this photo during take-off from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. These days you are usually still told no electronic devices during take-off, and that includes most cameras. My Olympus SLR had no fancy electronics and certainly nothing that might interfere with the communications systems in a plane. There were no warnings or prohibitions, so I was free to take photos from the plane window.