Travels at Home

When the pandemic arrived, with its lockdowns and social distancing requirements, I found myself at a loss for something to do. What does a travel photographer shoot when neither he nor anyone else is allowed to travel? Well, he can always re-invent the idea of travel to include those little local journeys we make from our doorsteps, and seeing in them the opportunity to see the familiar with fresh eyes. In my case it was my morning bicycle rides. For me a bicycle was always a means of imaginative escape, and had been since I was a kid, roving the neighbourhood on a secondhand Schwann newsboy and daydreaming of the great journeys I would make one day in the great ungraspable future when I didn’t have to go to school or be home in time for dinner. I returned to that – only this time as a middle-aged magazine photographer. Taking along a backpack full of camera bodies and lenses, and lashing my tripod to the rack of my doughty English tourer, I began photographing my morning jaunts as though they were magazine travel assignments. What started out as a lark, soon grew into something much more – a celebration of the beauty that exists all around us, but we never notice because it’s always there and because we have this misguided notion that ‘travel’ requires distance if it is to be meaningful or interesting. I was living in a faded old seaside town called St Leonards-on-Sea, in East Sussex, on the south coast of England. It’s not on anybody’s list of celebrated English beauty spots. Indeed like most of England’s faded old seaside towns it’s considered a deprived area, of high unemployment and low incomes. Much of my riding was along down-at-heel seafront promenades or across flat coastal marshes. And yet, as I soon discovered, there was so much beauty and interest here. I was astonished I’d never noticed it before. I’d pause to read the inscriptions on monuments or marvel at architectural detail and delighted in the way a favourable slant of sunshine could transform the seafront or the marshes.  I’ve always been an early riser, but as this project of mine took root and grew around me, I found myself leaving the house earlier and earlier – sometimes as early as 3am during the summer months so I could be where I wanted to be in time to catch the dawn’s first light. And I looked forward to these outings in the way I used to look forward to hopping on a plane to the far side of the globe – before the world became small and shopworn under a surfeit of frequent flyer miles. Later, after the photos from this project were published in the New York Times, and I was being interviewed on the BBC, it was put to me that I must be looking forward to getting on a plane again, I replied that no, I really didn’t. There was too much to see and explore right here at home.

In all of these photos the cyclist in the frame is me – I am both the photographer and the model, a form of photography that took a lot of practice and an entirely new skill set to master. But while I may have been the model, none of these pictures are meant to be about me, but rather A Cyclist on the landscape. It could be anybody, you perhaps. The point of them is to pique the imagination, celebrate the independance and liberation of a bicycle ride, and the simple joys of discovery that await on your doorstep if you’re willing to look.