My mum’s interest in photography probably only really began when she joined the Indonesian Heritage Society. Bored with spending too much time at home and having long lost the novelty of being a glamorous ‘lady that lunches’, she packed her bags and a DSLR and ventured off into the wilderness.
She would always return wide-eyed with her mouth full of the stories she couldn’t wait to spit out – from Papua New Guinea tribe members to the Badui people of the Banten province in Java, tales of people she had met and the places she’d been seemed infinite.
The closest we could ever get to experiencing the trip through her eyes were by looking at the photographs she had taken. Clicking the SD card out of her Canon 60D and into her laptop’s card reader, each image icon would flutter by like a flipbook animation. Once uploaded into the digital sphere, the thousands of photos that captured so many inimitable experiences were laid to rest in the sentimentally titled ‘My Pictures’ file.
Somewhat swept aside as nothing more than a collection of snapshots, that is where they typically remained. It was only fairly recently that my mum became a member of multiple photography societies on Facebook, with each page featuring something unique from urban street to wildlife. Suddenly, every two minutes of silence was now permeated with exclamations of sheer awe at the plethora of artistic talent so plainly visible on the social network.
Inspired by others, she slowly began to blow off the digital dust that had come to coat the photographs of her travels. With the timidity of a child entering the classroom for the first time, my mum published the first of many of her favourite shots on the page’s wall. What first struck us as typical holiday snaps suddenly transformed in our eyes into works of art. And so began the stream of ‘likes’ and complimentary comments about her rare talent for immortalising the moments witnessed by so few, with the simple click of the shutter.
Motivated by this positive reception, she dug deeper into her photographic past unravelling entire pictographic narratives of the seemingly mundane yet remarkable lives of different people around the world. The more photos she looked through, the greater the mystery of these places she had already been to grew. As with so many expeditions, there remained the itching sense that she had only scratched the surface of what there was to see.
Suddenly, travel had nothing to do with sightseeing. Landmarks were merely blocking the view of the people that gave the land its real character. Travelling became about finding the beauty of a foreign place in the most ordinary of situations and through the faces of its people.
Inherent with social networking, my mum got to know her fellow photography fanatics through a shared passion of observing life through the lens. And, with the gentle agitation of photo paper in developing fluid, future plans to travel together as a photography troupe began to materialise.
The nature of travel has now changed for people clustered together in the digital realm. A common love for unique perspectives is not only uniting people from across the world but actually has the capacity to bring them together. Our ‘global exploration’ in the digital world is guiding our discovery of the actual one.
