On the road, life is but a blur of pictures

Towards the end of his travelogue, The Innocents Abroad, written aboard the USS Quaker City, the incorrigible wit Mark Twain noted: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” He meant it for his
American bedfellows, but the statement could apply to almost every living human being. The tourist, as the traveller has come to be known in our day and age, can be seen in almost every city. The flashes of their cameras light up nights from Rio to Tokyo.They attempt to soak in a foreign culture, using snapshots to emblazon their memories. But in the rush to capture every image, the eternal ones slip by, lost in the flash frenzy that often accompanies these wandering souls. But some see rather than simply look, and they are the true captors of heritage and life.
Take for instance, the great picture taken by amateur photographer (he was until May 18, 1980, anyway) Gary Rosenquist. His all powerful picture, taken on that day, of Mount St Helens erupting at dawn captivated the world.
It cast nature in all her fury on a canvas the size of our imaginations. The photograph was good enough to be snatched up by those two colossi of photojournalism: National Geographic and Life
magazine. Travelling is essential to great photography.
During my Reuter’s Foundation Fellowship at the Missouri University in Columbia, Missouri, I was adamant that I wouldn’t save any money. Rather, anything I had would go into travelling around the US; be it a weekend jaunt to a nearby town, or a road trip following the tyre tracks of Kerouac or the wagon trails of Steinbeck. And thanks to the Greyhound, all this was possible.
During my second week at the university, I set off to see the beautiful Lake Mykee town in Callaway County — a part of Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri. The trip, which spanned the weekend was spent in the company of my German colleague Liz Van Hooser. We went to visit her grandparents, who lived in Lake Mykee, and it turned out to be a photographer’s dream. Not only did I get to photograph the Jefferson County skyline, but spent hours walking through the vineyards, run by the Hoosers.
Another memorable trip was to Zion, where I managed to hone my still photography thanks to its wonderful 18th Century church. Then there was Carthage (not of Hannibal Barca fame) with a population of under 5,000. It’s a wonderland, aptly termed by Walt Disney as, ‘Some Place Else’. It was at Springfield that I photographed that icon of popular culture, Route 66,which runs from Chicago to New York. I also had the pleasure to meet, Larry Bornbazine (the surname means, Keeper of the Flame), a Native American. He sat next to me on the bus, and by the end of my journey, we were fast friends. He invited me to his home in Chesterfield, where I met his extended 18-member family who had gathered there for the weekend.
I offered to stay in an inn nearby, but Larry was having none of it. So I spent the weekend in their small but large-hearted home. It was to be a fortuitous meeting, as I learned volumes about a community that, up until that day, I had read about only in my school textbooks.The Bornbazine family portraits I took, are some of my most cherished.
My advice to you fellow traveller, is to ensure that you keep that small camera with you always during your travels, be it from home to office or on that trip across Europe. Who knows what the future may throw up for you to photograph.
I will end with a quote from one of the greatest travellers of his time, Jack Kerouac: “So long and take it easy, because if you start taking things seriously, it is the end of you.”