Go Deep

In 2018 my wife started talking about a concept she’d read in a blog post called “Slow Travel”. It’s the opposite of the typical vacation where you blast through a country or city in a week or two. A day in Paris, a day in Normandy, a day in Nice, ending in Rome, etc…Sprinting from landmark to landmark, checking boxes.

The idea is to go somewhere and stay. A week, a month, two months. Long enough to learn a place’s eccentricities, its nuances, its layers. Go deep, not fast.

That idea changed how I work.

In the summer of 2017 I visited Table Rock in northeast Boise about 25 times — hiking around it at different times of day, discovering every trail, every angle, every mood the light could find there. This shot was taken at sunrise from the back side of the Table. It came on one of the last visits.

I know photographers who travel to exotic locations to “take” exotic photographs of exotic things. I’ve done it — I have an entire portfolio of Tunisian camels. There’s nothing wrong with it. But slow travel stuck with me, so I went back to dig deeper instead of moving on.

The place you think you know after one visit is a different place on the fifth, the tenth, the twenty-fifth. You have to return. You have to dig. You have to let the place decide what it wants to show you, and when.

So that’s what I do now. I explore the same ground again and again. I’m patient.

I peel the onion.