Making photos as a tourist is a real challenge because easily we will end with the same photo as other thousands of tourist colleagues made with they big Canons or any sort of mobile. This is part of today’s make and throw system.
Is there a way to make something that appeals at our eyes and at the same time offers a different and special image to our audience?.
Big monuments or known places are what is supposed to make a city different from others, but in our times, we, tourist go so easily anywhere that iconic landmarks are not really showing much of a place anymore, in the other hand avoiding these landmarks can make us end with a picture without any known context that could be shot in any other place in the world making the need of travel to become unnecessary to take it. This remembrance of something is deep in our minds  and we may use Mnemonics as a technique to add something in the story that gives the audience enough information to help in the decoding process on what is seeing, for instance, a kangaroo running in the background will make us believe that we are seeing a real Australia. While this technic works in Graphic design or even for movies, doesn’t work so well for stills because our audience are going to look at the picture a very few seconds and if there’s something there that takes they attention, by been already known, our image could become anecdotic.
The next question is, where is the limit? when are we going to have an interesting picture? and when are we going to start loosing the place context?.
Below there’s a series of photos made in Napoli that have been deliberately chosen to find both concepts, some of thema are telling the story with a place remembrance and others fully loosing any place context, you may decide what’s better but to me doesn’t really matter where a picture has been made, as the context should be part of the story and what I do really like is the picture by itself, just an opinion of course.
Olympus OMD M5 Mark II
