Hi all
I confess that this particular subject has been inspired by some debate in the other forum I belong to, but it certainly has relevance for people like me who travel a fair bit.
The gist of it is this: Is travel photography as a genre a dead duck? To begin with, how do you define it? If I travel to, say, India and take a bunch of pictures, then that presumably counts as travel photography. But what about a native Indian photographer taking exactly the same shots - that presumably ISN'T travel photography, because it is his home! So what exactly IS travel photography in the first place, and should there even be such a genre?
And if it is related to travelling from home, how far do I have to go? Another country? A few miles? In times past, "travel" photography" was probably exactly that, with intrepid adventurers going to exotic places, lugging their full-frame camera with them, and presenting images of places that few people of their day could ever hope to see in real life. In these days of relatively cheap travel and ubiquitous digital cameras, does the whole concept really apply any more?
Secondly, consider what passes for a lot of travel photography: a lot of it (to be honest) consists of brightly dressed poor people posed against equally colourful decay. Maybe that is a little bit of a generalisation, but isn't that precisely what people "think" of when they think of India (to use my previous example)? Seems to me that there is an implicit western mindset behind those kind of pictures, and perhaps even a kind of neo-Colonialism which could be read as offensive - I wonder what the average Indian might think of the images that a western visitor to India might bring back and show to his friends?
Now, someone will jump in here and say "What about the excellent travel photography in National Geographic, etc?" Without wishing in any way to decry the wonderful images you can find in mags like that, you could make a very strong argument that National Geographic (for instance) is really more about documentary or journalistic photography than travel photography per se.
I know I have raised more questions than answers and I certainly don't have all the solutions - maybe it is genuinely in flux at the moment. But it certainly has me thinking.
Cheers
Mike