Travels At Home

When the pandemic struck in 2020, with its strict lockdowns and closed borders, those of us who earned our livings as travel writers and photographers found ourselves busted flat, with nothing to do and nowhere to do it – or so it seemed at first. Looking for a way to fend off boredom and give myself a creative outlet, I began taking my cameras and tripod with me on my morning bicycle rides and shooting them as though they were magazine travel stories and I were on an expedition to distant places.

What started out as a lark soon became a revelation as I discovered just how much travelling there was to do within a twelve-mile radius of my doorstep, and how little need there was to hop on a plane and jet off to the far side of the world to experience a sense of the exotic and the romance of difference.

It also grew into an absorbing technical challenge in learning how to capture images of myself on the road. In all of these photos I am both the photographer and the cyclist in the frame, a juggling act that required me to be actor, director, producer and cameraman all at once.

In creating these I took great care to anonymise myself as much as possible to make these images about A Cyclist on the landscape, and not about me. Galleries of my Travels at Home images received a great run in the New York Times and later were featured on the BBC, in The Guardian, as well as numerous other magazines and podcasts and became the subject of a documentary film by Sussex film-maker David Thomas.