THe reality of travel

2017

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination with reality, and instead of thinking of how things may be, see them as they are.”

     - Samuel Johnson

The Reality of Travel is a book highlighting and publishing the reality of some of the most well-known landmarks and locations in and around my hometown of Bath. It shows that we should not always believe what we see in the media. When we visit a city or location, we always have a vision of what it should look like from images we’ve seen in the past. From the beautiful white sand and crystal clear water of islands in the Caribbean, to the stunning historical architecture of countless European cities, many of these visions are in fact only a very biased and carefully crafted view of each location. The reality of these tourist locations are more often than not incredibly different from our initial impressions. Current travel photography publishers have become able to influence and adapt our opinions of particular locations, usually only showing the very best of the best, and this is commonly not consistent throughout the entire area. They also tend to favour using photographs of frequently seen iconic tourist landmarks and locations over more realistic and cultured places that are nearby in the same city.