Rework the obvious, obviously
If you run into creative roadblocks when shooting, try attacking the problem face on
One genuine and new-ish problem facing travel photography in its many forms is that all wellknown subjects have been photographed so many times that they’ve been picked clean visually. On the face of it, there’s nothing left. Think of a famous location, from the Eiffel Tower to the Grand Canyon, and it’s been comprehensively covered by a multitude of cameras and their owners. If you make the mistake of Googling one of these by ‘Images’, you’ll see an inevitable sameness, which is hardly surprising (100 million for the first and 300 million for the second, the last time I looked). Many famous sites have a very few obvious viewpoints, and if they involve architecture and are in cities, they’ve been planned that way.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with obvious, and if you or I visit one for the first time, we’re likely to enjoy the view as much as has everyone before us. It starts to become complicated when you decide to photograph it… creatively.
Fresh avenues
I say new-ish guardedly, because while it seems fairly recent to me after a lifetime of shooting, I realize that an increasing number of photographers have known no other situation, so it may seem less of a problem than an unavoidable condition. There was a time when photographs – of anything – were not so readily available to publishers, and it was normal for photographers to be assigned to go anywhere to shoot, however well-known. At the higher end of the creative business, the understanding was that the photographer would come back with his or her special interpretation of even the most over-photographed monument or feature. More than that, it was expected. We all took it as a personal challenge to be able to go beyond the cliché. One of my early clients, Time-life Books, published a highly regarded series of books called The Great Cities, and the icons of these cities were high on the editors’ shot list. The Paris volume was shot by a great photographer, Raghubir Singh, and the cover shot (which for this series was, remarkably, a full-bleed image unsullied by any words whatsoever, not even the title), was indeed of the Eiffel Tower. I won’t spoil it for you by describing the way Raghubir shot it, but even today it has a freshness and originality. It’s Googleable. My book in this Time-life Books series, which was an absolute joy to work on, was Athens, and so my cliché challenge was the Acropolis. A view of this is pretty hard to avoid from anywhere in the city centre, so I did a lot of exploration, mainly with a long lens.
The creative path that I’m suggesting, therefore, is the head-on challenge. It means choosing somewhere accessible for you that has already been photographed to death by others. Your chances of success are not going to be high, but instead of shrugging your shoulders, try and make this an incentive. In my case, I live a short walk from the fabulously ornate Albert Memorial, and after its restoration and regilding a few years ago, it’s become an increasingly popular tourist attraction (almost 200 million results on Google).
I recently had another go at it, my idea being a long lens, a narrow format, and a particular play of light on the statue that I’ve become familiar with during late afternoons in autumn. As for success, it shows nothing of the overall shape of the monument, so it’s a resounding failure on that score, but even so I came away satisfied that I’d found one different treatment. There is and always has been a competitive edge to this kind of challenge. You’re trying to capture something that hasn’t occurred to other people. Even just as a personal training exercise, I think it’s worth a go.