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| © William Abranowicz |
| Click photo to see more images. |
For many photographers, travel has a way of blurring the distinctions between the personal and the professional. "It's always about the women," says William Abranowicz, explaining why he chooses the Greek islands as his favorite place to photograph. Case in point: his photograph of a sun-drenched beach on the island of Mykonos.
"This is a beach I went to on my first trip to Greece," says Abranowicz, who has been shooting for Condé Nast Traveler for many years. That was in 1984, when Abranowicz accompanied a girlfriend to the Mediterranean for a vacation. He and the girlfriend eventually parted, but in the meantime he fell for Greece.
Since then the New York-based photographer has thoroughly documented the Greek mainland and many of the 3,000 Greek islands, from the Cycladic chain (famous for its white architecture) to the Dodecanese chain in the south, influenced by the Italians who occupied them in World War II. He published his first book, The Greek File: Images of a Mythic Land (Rizzoli), in 2001 and is now completing his second volume on Greece.
These days Abranowicz navigates his way among some 11 million tourists who come to Greece each year, yet he still finds spots that he calls "absolutely authentic." The island of Aegina, just off the mainland near Athens, is one. In Crete, he photographed a World War II resistance fighter holding a picture of his own father, who once fought invading Turks. "I travel in part to experience history," says Abranowicz.
And beauty: In 2004 he returned to that beach on Mykonos, expecting it to be overrun by tourists. "It looked just as it had 20 years earlier," says Abranowicz. Once again, it was all about the women.
-- David Schonauer
Rome
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| © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos |
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"When most travel photographers go to some destination, the last thing they want to see are tourists," says Martin Parr. "But that's usually the first thing I want to see."
To be sure, most photographers in general are not like Parr, whose eye for cultural detail is matched by his playful enjoyment of human behavior. While most travel photographers focus on seductive landscapes or colorful locals, Parr's photography is closer to documentary work -- or even anthropology. He chose Rome as one of the 10 great destinations for photographers because of "the quality of its tourists."
Is it possible to capture a city by photographing the people who visit it? In Parr's sense of the world, it is. "Here you have the Eternal City, which is fundamentally one of the most magical cities, exquisitely beautiful, and what you notice are all the people who have come to be part of it," he says. "To me, people are much more interesting than ruins. People move around and change. Ruins just sit there and do nothing."
Parr famously photographed tourists in his 1995 book Small World, and he decided to revisit the subject in 2006 when he was approached by the Rome Festival of Photography to work on a project about the city. He shot the project -- which later was published as a book called Tutta Roma -- with a 35mm SLR and a macro lens. "I'm looking for a sense of the place," he says, "but also to get a lot of detail into the foreground." Parr also uses a ring flash for much of his travel photography. "It has this sort of studio light -- no shadows, no emotion, just hard, clear, beautiful light," he explains. He usually combines the flash with ambient light. "To get the backgrounds I dial the flash in so they are exposed exactly the same as the foreground," he says.
-- D.S.
Nome, Alaska
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| © Alec Soth |
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It's more of a town than a city, with one main street and, in the spring, a world of mud. To get there you fly into Anchorage, then you take a smaller plane, along with perhaps 20 other people, to a small airfield. Then you climb into a taxi, which is actually an old van used at night to pick up the town's drunks. "It's not an elegant ride," says photographer Alec Soth.
Nome may indeed be the kind of place that is best found through happenstance rather than planning. Soth found it in May 2006, when he traveled there from his home in Minneapolis on assignment for GQ magazine. "Being dropped into new places is why I take assignments," says the photographer, who mixes fine-art work with photojournalism. The story was about a local police officer involved in a murder case, and, says Soth, "it never panned out." Instead, he took in the wide landscapes, the rugged local characters, the clouds that seemed to hang ten feet overhead, and most of all the dull sunlight that shone until midnight. Standing behind his 8x10 camera, he knew he was a long way from the American heartland he photographed for his celebrated book Sleeping by the Mississippi (Steidl, 2004). He had arrived at the American frontier.
"I felt a weightiness that was unlike anything I'd experienced," Soth says. "Even though it was daylight all the time, it seemed like an oppressive light." The terminus of the annual Iditarod dogsled race, Nome is full of dogs -- and the sound of dogs, howling at the light. And it is populated with rugged characters, like the gold prospector (left) who Soth photographed at midnight, panning in the frigid cold without gloves. At the edge of the world, Soth found something truly American.
-- D.S.
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