Many of the great artists were travellers. Gauguin travelled to the islands of Martinique and Tahiti for inspiration; Van Gogh hopped all over Europe; and it wasn’t until Australia’s Margaret Preston returned from extensive travels abroad that she discovered that there’s more than one vision in art.
Creative ideas spring from experiencing the world in novel and original ways, and travel achieves this objective splendidly. That is, if you leave your camera at home.
Susan Sontag in On Photography deplores our need to clutch a camera when we’re out of our comfort zone. “It is common for those who have glimpsed something beautiful to express regret at not having been able to photograph it. So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful,” she writes. Sontag argues that taking photos is a way of refusing life, of limiting experience to a search for the photographic.
Indeed, few today gaze up at the iron legs of the Eiffel Tower and conjure up a music score or a few stanzas of poetry; start a sketch or a diary entry. Rather, with vision bounded by the camera’s eye, we line up our target – and, snap. A scene is frozen in time while a moment of experience, an opportunity for growth, is lost forever.
From the "News from nowhere" section of Travel edition, available from our online store
