A few thoughts..

This collection was taken over the past 9 months and is my first foray into something like “serious” travel photography. It’s only in the past 2 years that I’ve found myself in a position to be able to travel freely and often. Like many people who work remote and choose to travel I owe this to the pandemic. For the first year and a half I truly had no clue what I was doing, I just wanted to see as much as I could. Of course, like everyone else I took photos on my phone wherever I went. They were low effort and low reward. On my trip to Argentina in May ‘22 the only photos I took were with iPhone 7. There are a few that may have been decent were they better quality, but in general my process was careless and I didn’t think of myself as a photographer in the slightest. The thing that changed that was my trip to South Africa in Fall ‘23. I had been browsing the shots I did get on prior trips and began to get the idea of putting them together in a collection, maybe a book or a website, but the problem was they were shitty photos. The original impetus for purchasing a camera was the idea of completing what in many ways was a childhood dream. I would be photographing wild animals in South Africa on a safari, and I knew I couldn’t go armed with only an iPhone 7.

I actually delayed for quite some time, trying shitty products like the telephoto lens attachments for iPhones. When it became clear it wasn’t going to give me beautiful photos of lions 200 yards away I bit it and bought the camera, a Sony A7r3, and a 28-200mm travel lens. What I found on that trip was that photography added an incredible dimension and robustness to my travelling. I had always spent the day wandering the streets with absolutely no goal in mind other than to soak in the vibes and maybe see something weird and cool. Now that I had a camera and had shifted my mindset in accordance with the goal to get a lot of good and interesting photos I not only had a reason to be up and on the streets at 6am, but to walk around all day long, to go into strange places, to aimlessly wander and to interact with the people I saw. I found myself chatting with people, laughing with people, sometimes pissing them off, getting invited to tea, getting shown weird things inside workshops and houses, the list goes on. Photography completely changed travel for me in a way that is almost exclusively net positive. So, with that bit of context in mind, the photos in these collections represent my first 7 months of photography, of putting in the effort, of intentionally framing elements, of seeking stories, and above all my first attempts to really document and share what I had been doing with people. (I almost always travel solo.) For me, it’s beyond obvious the progression from the earliest photos in South Africa where I was too shy to take a photo of anyone on the street and literally hab never used the camera before to the photos in India which I think are pretty successful at capturing the drama and chaos and extreme beauty of the place. Now when I travel I start with ideas of things I want to photograph, and perhaps the only negative aspect of all of this is that I have very quickly shifted my mindset from “I’m a traveler with a camera, I’ll take pics of whatever I run into” to “I’m a travel photographer, I will seek out photos all day long.” Given my psycological tendency to fixate and obsess on one thing I have to be intentional with my time and try to leave room for the kind of beautiful, strange serendipity that one finds in strange unknown places. That is, for the serendipitous moments that do not lead to a good photo. Because that’s truly what my photography is, it’s capturing the things that serendipitously appeared as I set myself in motion on a given day, as I walked the streets with only the vague goal of seeing what was going on and taking pictures of it if I could.

I have very quickly shifted my mindset from “I’m a traveler with a camera, I’ll take pics of whatever I run into” to “I’m a travel photographer, I will seek out photos all day long.”

Right now where I’m at, as I prepare for my next trip, is that I feel like during the last trip to India and Nepal I really understood what I was doing with the camera and what the project was going to be. Before that I was adolescently and compulsively taking photos without the discerning eye that I have now. I was, and still am, feeling out the possibilities of this field in which I just so happen to have stumbled upon a latent talent apparently. I’ve spent time looking into what it would take to turn it into a career, and if that would be fruitful or a waste of time, it’s forced me to reflect on my relationship with creativity as it pertains to commerce, not only for photography but for design and the nagging angst I feel for not enjoying my work as much as I once did. It’s a kind of guilt, as if I’m breaking a promise I made to myself years ago to be a successful designer making bad-ass enviable brands and typography at one of the avant-garde studios in New York. In some ways I did make that promise, if not verbally then through years of marching with blinders on towards that idea, working on my portfolio until I had redone it ten times over, playing the role I thought was right and in every way making design a very important thing in my life. Now, with the 7 or so years of experience I have in the field, and with all of the tragedy and grief and upheaval that the world has gone through with the pandemic, I now see that life as hollow and actually pathetic. It’s truly a tragic thing to devote yourself mind and body to creative work that ultimately brings to fruition nothing more useful than a 2,807th brand of potato chips or soda, or some new plant based food, or name any one of the endless commercial ventures that in the name of Shark Tank have launched useless and excessive products only to have them fail two years later. I’ve essentially reconsidered my entire relationship with work and pleasure, which blend messily in the case of creatives and tend to fog up a sense of why you’re doing what you’re doing. Working 60 hours a week in high pressure environments absolutely does not fit the new reality I’m living in post-reflection, an opinion bolstered by the anecdotes of friends who have gone that route, a once enviable route, a once the only thing I ever wanted route... So now, with my newfound wisdom I realize I’ve found myself living in the exact opposite pole to that life. Instead of blending work and passion I’ve almost, but not quite, been getting by with them completely dissociated. Instead I’ve found my passion in things that, while creative, are not at all in the same orbit as designing typefaces and learning to code and animating logos for brands that I invented. I’ve found my passion in travel, in photography, in cooking, and in language learning, and in that awkward process of shifting targets I realized that the opportunity for that kind of reflection and transformation was offered to me on a silver platter each morning by a job for which I feel not a sliver of passion. It’s the polar opposite of dying for a new york branding agency. I’ve had the freedom to do more or less whatever crosses my mind, so long as I complete the boring, tedious, but overall trivial and insignificant workload that follows me around with no sense of urgency, and not only have I had the freedom of time, but the job itself, even when it’s a bit busy, does not exhaust that part of my mind that goes on creative journeys, that imagines and brings things into existence. And, perhaps most importantly, the remuneration I receive for this passionless job is, to my eyes, enormous and unwarranted. It’s true that I do feel guilt, often daily, for not living out and dedicating time to the design work which only a few years ago still felt like a surety in my life, as if it would always be a kind of hazy goal to pursue. I have bursts of intense, frenetic creative energy that come less and less often as the years pass, but ultimately I’ve realized something very important about my creative past, and that’s that it was fueled mostly by drug induced enthusiasm from habits that I’m leaving behind in my 30s. I look back and I see the chaotic jumbles of shapes and colors and textures mixed together in a work, an art object, a poster, a design that projects no sense of sensibility when it comes to process, meaning, and the little decisions taken every second while glued to Illustrator on a deadline. It’s just aesthetic chaos.

photos for this post
(12)

Image 01

Image 02

Image 03

Image 04

Pictures from my trip to South Afirca below:

Image 00 - ppl walking not in Africa tho

Image 30

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journal Entry Number 02

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Alex Sweet