MY NEXT PHOTO-TRIP: WHAT I PACK, WHY, AND WHICH KIND OF PICTURES I PLAN TO TAKE

I’d like switch my focus from murals and street-art, to introduce my next planned trip throughout the Caribbean. This is also a way to let you know that probably I won’t make any new post for about one month. Why the Caribbean? Well, one good explanation is that living in the DC area is easy and not very expensive to reach any island in the Caribbean Sea. Another good motive is that almost all islands between the north shore of South America and the Gulf of Mexico are a real paradise (when a hurricane does not hit them) and a great opportunity for passionate photographers (even if a hurricane hit them, but I really hope none will do it).  

If you do not have several months and, like me, you have not been traveling very much in the region, choosing where to go in the Caribbean is not easy. After reading and researching for many weeks, and after several conversations with my wife, I decided to focus on four islands between the French Antilles and the Windward Islands: Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, and St. Lucia.

These islands are rating as four of the Caribbean best destinations in several travel magazines and books, and they are among the top islands suggested by the Caribbean Lonely Planet guide. 

Moreover, you can travel from one island to another by sea, avoiding annoying airports and airplanes for three whole weeks. Nature and beaches are a main reason too, of course, but they are common to most Caribbean islands, and then they are not a specific reason for my choice.

What about the equipment? Even if we are going to drive inside each island, we have to fly to Guadeloupe from the United States, and to move by boat to the other islands. For this reason, we must travel as light as possible. For a photographer, this means to find the best compromise between comfort and technical requirements.

The first issue is about what we are going to photograph. The choice depends on your personal interests as a photographer and on the characteristics of the regions you are going to visit. In my case, I am thinking mostly about landscape and street-photography, with people and not (I will discuss more about this topic in another post). For that I will pack the following gears:

·        

      ➽My Canon EOS 70D

·        ➽A versatile zoom which, in my case, is the invaluable TAMRON 16-300mm F/3.5-6.3 Di II

·        ➽A wide angle, useful for both street and landscape photography.  My choice is TAMRON 10-20mm F/4-5.6 DC HSM

·        ➽  A light tripod. I decided for my Velbon MAX I 343E, with a PH-243 Ball Head. I find the ball head more versatile than a pan head for this kind of trip. I bought this aluminum tripod several years ago,  and I still find it very good for travelling. It is light, reasonably stable, and very fast to set up (which is a big plus when you travel).·         

          ➽A flash, my Canon Speedlight 580EX

      ➽And of course some accessories: lens cleanse, extra batteries, polarizing and neutral density filters, etc.

Strictly speaking, the 16-300 zoom might be sufficent, and you might avoid the wide angle and a heavy flash with its batteries relying on the terrible pop-up flash of your DSLR, if you have one. Actually, that of the 70D does a decent job. This may be a good idea if you have to hike hard and want to take care of your back.

However, if you are really concerned about the quality of your images, I believe that the gears listed above are essential. Besides, in our case it is not a big problem. We have some easy hike in our program, but in these cases we may always choose to leave some gears at the hotel or in the car.

A few more words about what I want to shoot. I believe is very important not to shoot randomly, especially during a trip. It is important to think before about what we want to achieve with our photographs. Even if I am travelling for pleasure, with no obligations, planning a sort of self-assignment and decide my priorities make my work more interesting and rewarding.

For this specific trip, I have two main goals in mind. First, telling a story about the places I will visit, from an anthropological point of view. This purpose implies a mix of landscapes, people and architecture. Second, documenting the trip itself, thinking at the same time about a photo-book describing our travel and a sort of family album about our vacation.

This two objective are complementary, and this is the good thing. Some images will be created with only one of these goals in mind, but many of the them will be used for both. When I make pictures, I like to work thinking about a book (paper or digital, it doesn’t matter) telling some kind of story. This helps me to create a more consistent work, so I will not find myself with a lot of material, without really knowing what to do with it.

If you have any question, concern or comment, please post them. See you next.

STREET ART AS A PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT

One of my current photo-projects is about Street Art. As you might have already read in the “Who I am” section of this blog (right column), during my life I have been a professional historian and I am a passionate photographer. So, I believe in the documentary value of photography. This is especially important in relation with Street Art, because many masterpieces painted on the walls along the streets last only a few years. Most of these works disappear over time or become very degraded and almost unrecognizable. Sometimes, the very building where the masterpiece is painted might be destroyed for several reasons. A meaningful example is the famous mural Wall of Respect (see the image, unknown photographer) painted in Chicago in 1967 and destroyed in 1971 to make way for urban renewal. Even if this is a poor image, it has great value from a documentary point of view. Photography may help to perpetuate these works forever.

I became aware for the first time of the existence of Street Art as a recognized artistic project in Italy, when, in 2008, I visited the Campidoglio neighborhood in the northern city of Turin. Of course, these kind of projects started long before, mostly in the United States and Canada, but at the time I did not know much about them.

In Turin, I started composing images of those wonderful pieces of art, some of them real masterpieces. Very soon I began to wonder about the true meaning of this kind of photography. Preservation, as I said before, was an important goal, but I was not satisfied with simply reproducing the artists’ work. As a photographer, I was concerned about adding something to the artists’ paints. How could I convert a set of images on the subject of street art into a real photographic project?

As a historian, I know the importance of context. To correctly understand an event, we must place it in its historical, cultural and/or anthropological context. An artistic event is not different from the others. For this reason, the photographer’s task is not simply about showing a work, but about visually explaining where the author has done this work and why. This is, of course, a much more challenging goal than reproducing and preserving, but it turns my work as a photographer and historian into something much more interesting and exciting. It implies researching and a lot of watching.

This is a first example of what I mean by that. This mural was created in Washington DC by artist Rose Jaffe in May 2016. It was painted on the wall of a homeless shelter, between 1^st and 2^nd St. NW, next to the Mitch Snyder Art & Education Center for the Homeless, within walking distance of the US Capitol and the Third Street Tunnel. For this reason, this image shows a federal employee walking in front of the mural, which do not have any relationship with the homeless shelter.

And here we have another important point about street art in photography. Composing pictures of different murals, I realized that is almost impossible to properly illustrate these artworks with a single image. A good work about this topic must show as much aspects as possible of a mural work: artistic and esthetic features, of course, but also the most meaningful details and the urban environment. This way of proceeding helps to communicate a key element of street art: the artist’s message, which, no matter if you share or not his/her vision, is inseparable from the work of art itself.

In the next post I will show more pictures and more information about this mural.