A few weeks ago I wrote on this blog about the feelings of dislocation that I often experience when i’ve recently returned home from a trip. The posting seemed to resonate with a lot of folks and I was inundated with personal emails on the subject! (Thanks!)

As of last night, I’ve just returned home from Iceland. The trip didn’t go as expected, but I’ve returned once again with that feeling of being outside myself, detached from my home life and more connected with the life I was leading while I was in iceland.

But there has been a realisation for me over the past month. I’ve started to notice that memories of places I know, or places I hang out in different countries and landscapes, are becoming intertwined with with each other, as if they all belong to the same place.

Dare I say it, but I feels as if the whole world is becoming my home these days, and it’s of no surprise when I consider where I’ve been and where I’m going this year alone;

Iceland (3 times)
Norway (2 times)
Chile
Argentina
Easter island
Bolivia
Australia / Tasmania
Portugal
Switzerland
….and also the workshops I’ve done at home here in Scotland

Memories of a familiar cafe in Reykjavík sit alongside memories of familiar restaurants in Chilean Patagonia. Walking up a street in downtown Reykjavík is becoming to feel as commonplace to me as I would feel walking up Sauchiehall street in Glasgow. The same is true, perhaps more importantly, for the landscape. The central highlands of Iceland, to my mind, are not too dissimilar from the landscape of the Bolivian altiplano. This is a rare luxury to own – the knowledge that there is familiarity in locations that others may find exotic. And sometimes certain landscapes trigger memories of other landscapes – I can get confused, thinking that one particular location I’ve witnessed belongs to the wrong country, simply because I see a similarity in the terrain.

I don’t bring this up to brag or boast. But merely to acknowledge that my life is far different from what it once was, and more importantly, it is causing me to re-interpret the landscapes I know so well – differently.

I seem to ‘see’ them in a different way now. Like friends you’ve known for so long, that do something out of character, and give you pause to re-think just who exactly they really are, there is a transformation that happens when landscapes from many countries start to become intertwined in your memories and thoughts. Features that seem very interesting to photograph, because they are exotic, can be used later, under a different occasion, and location, to interpret that other landscape differently. It’s hard for me to explain this. But maybe if I boil it down to this – it might be easier to understand: I’ve photographed many waterfalls in different countries. How I approach a particular waterfall on repeat visits tends to be influenced by how I got to know it in the first place. But what if I visit a brand new waterfall, in a different country, and it has a very similar look/feel/terrain/whatever to a well known waterfall? I find myself approaching it as if it’s a familiar friend to me already. My previous experiences are having an impact on my new experiences.

The world feels like my home, and I have spent so much time in places far and away from my home in Scotland, that I now have favourite haunts wherever I go.

But as much as all the traveling is making the world a smaller place for me, there is a price for all this and maybe one which isn’t so immediately apparent.

There are places I know so well, but I am realising that my friends know little of. I have become a stranger to my close friends through the acquisition of knowledge I’ve gained of new surroundings.

I’ve changed.

I would argue that most of our friends know the same terrain, the same places as we do. There is comfort and familiarity in knowing the same places. Like being from the same town, we feel we understand each other better if we share the same experiences, if we know the same locations, have felt and understand the types of rain you can get in Glencoe for instance.

I’m aware that some of my friends have little understanding of what it is that i’ve witnessed over the past few years of making images in foreign locations. But that doesn’t mean that their experiences are less valid than mine. I can be found to crave the simplicity of routine, of waking up in the same bed for more than a few weeks at a time. And their lives are going on, just as importantly as mine is. But our path’s have diverged, and it’s inevitable that I’ve become a little more distant because of this.

If all this were to grind to a halt tomorrow. No more travel for me, then I would welcome the chance to get ingrained back into a Scottish way of life. I don’t feel I can do that so easily right now as I’m often having to put my life on pause back here in Scotland while I go traveling. I feel like more than one person at times. But then again, it’s so lovely to meet up with my Norwegian friends in Lofoten when I go to run my photography trips there. They are as close to me, as friends that I have a few miles away from where I live in Edinburgh. I would also miss out on getting re-aquainted with the landscapes I love. I’ve had a serious love for Torres del Paine national park in Chilean Patagonia, and my visits are usually not longer than two or three years apart, since i first ventured there in 2003. I would find it hard to say goodbye to it, if I felt I was never to return.

But this assumption that I will return, is a luxury, and one that has been brought on by a radical change in my lifestyle. Have I changed through the experiences that having these close relationships with landscapes far and wide brings? Have I changed – through experiencing all the people I’ve met through my work, and all the friends I now have on just about every continent there is? Yes I think I have changed. My outlook is much more open. I feel less like a Scot, and more like a citizen of the world. One who still has an interest in finding out more about the world, and I guess that’s just great.

Yesterday I paid the final balance due for the printing of my second book. The book should be here by the end of October and I will be illustrating a sample copy of it – possibly around August time.

I’ve prepared a little video of the proofs for the book. Please accept my apologies for my self-depreciating humour – I often like to tell everyone how brilliant I am (clearly a joke), but some folks tell me I’m hard to read and they don’t often know when I’m joking or not, so thought I should let you know that I’m really not being serious at all : ). You can view the video here:

embedded by Embedded Video

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Below is the specification that has been printed onto the top of the slip-case design they’ve sent me for evaluation. The color is not the final choice – it’s just a sample, completely empty, nothing printed on it, so I can get a feel for the quality and weight of the final product.

Below is the slip-case design, and to the side you can see the book as it is slipped into the side of the case.

Every now and then, something happens to make me take a step back, and review where I am. I think it’s extremely important as a creative person to do this. Just this week, I was emailed the inset photograph by my Chilean guide – Sabine, who accompanied me on my little photo-tour of Torres del Paine national park in Chile a few weeks back (in the inset picture, I’m the one standing with my back to the camera (left) with Polly, one of my participants from Australia – looking out towards the Towers of Paine, across Laguna Armaga in Chilean Patagonia).

I don’t often see photos of myself in the ‘environments’ I frequent these days, and this image in particular has made me think…..

A few years ago, I was sitting very comfortably in an IT office in the middle of Edinburgh. My life was pretty normal, I went home in the evenings, caught up with friends, did the shopping, washing, went back to work the next day and so life continued for me, as it always had.

Each day I would look outside of my office window, and I’d watch as the clouds crawled across the view I had over the rooftops of Edinburgh, over Arthurs Seat (extinct volcano) and over the seasons I’d witness the same landscape change. I was an onlooker, dreaming of being outside more often than inside. I felt my life was pretty good, but I’d always wished to be outside more often, making images more often too.

Roll forward to today, I’m just home from a month’s long trip to Patagonia, Bolivia and Easter Island. Things couldn’t be more different for me these days compared to my life back in my comfortable little IT office. I now run a successful photographic workshop business, I spend most of my life outside, watching the clouds crawl across some very beautiful landscapes here in Scotland. In the past year, I’ve expanded my business to Norway, Iceland, Patagonia and Bolivia. I wouldn’t have dared guess that this is what I would be doing back in 2007 when I first had ideas of changing career.

Although it has not been plain sailing, and like every job out there, my new job has it’s downsides as well as upsides, I find that I’m much more content at what I do, and I also feel I’m more in touch with who I am as well. I’ve learned so much about myself through the act of setting up and running a photographic workshop business.

In many ways, I’ve had to review just who I am. I think we all carry around with us a mental image of who we are, and of our own abilities. I’ve had to seriously reconsider my own mental image as I think it was really out of date. For years I felt I didn’t have much initiative, or was able to be pro-active enough to do things for myself. I’ve found that it’s simply not true.

I wish, that if you have aspirations to do something new with your life, that you can find the inspiration and encouragement to try them out. Often the signs are there, the clues that we need to make some changes to our lives, but we seldom take their cue and run with it.

I’ve been more scared in the past three years than I have been in my entire life. Running my business has been like riding the crest of a wave. Thrilling and often making me feel very, very alive indeed. There’s been very little in the way of staidness to it.

I think that with whatever it is that you’re doing, whether you’re creating art, engineering bridges, building roads, writing computer programs, just taking a moment to stop and reflect on who you are, where you currently are and what it is that you want is a vital ingredient to having a good life. I believe that everything that has happened to me over the past few years – has happened because I wanted it to, and by visualising where I wanted to be, I was naturally steering my own course in the direction I wanted to go.

Patagonia was brilliant by the way, as too was the Bolivian altiplano. Both landscapes were extremely different, and it was really something to get to come back to some places that I have a deep connection with. If I had to go back to my IT job now, I guess I would adapt to that, but I don’t think I could ever live with the prospect of never going back to revisit Patagonia and the Altiplano. They are like good friends that I have to keep in touch with. They feel like home, and sometimes I think I’ve become a citizen of the world through my own love for remote landscapes.

A friend once said to me – recognising in me what was in her – that we were both searchers. Travellers are not restless when they travel, they are often at peace with themselves because they are free to explore and discover their world.

Note that I said ‘their’ world. We all live on the same world, but each and every one of us has our own perception, and our own special way of being wired into what we see, hear and above all, feel.

When I travel I’m often at peace. When I am stationary for too long, I can’t find balance in my life because things are too static, staid perhaps.

I’ve just returned from a month long journey. Along the way I’ve changed. I felt new things, met new people I had not encountered before in my life, saw familiar landscapes in different moods, brought on by visiting in different seasons. I felt I was alive.

And returning home has caused me dislocation. The feeling that familiarity brings, is no longer familiar. I have not lived in a predictable environment for some time, and I’m finding it difficult to adjust to the static aspects of a life routed in one spot.

I thought I should be over this by now. I’ve lived a very travel-intensive life the past three or four years and I’d gotten used to going away, only to come home again. To flip between a life of new experiences and a life of familiar friends and family. Sometimes I thought I was becoming two people. Two separate lives. Where in fact, I was just coping with the sudden change of atmosphere. Moving from one environment of change to another of familiarity.

It shouldn’t bother me so much now, after all this time. I should have grown a thick skin to my sensitivities to the slight or sudden changes to my environment, but I’m glad in a way that I havent. Because it means I’m still sensitive to my environment, and my environment is all that I have to relate to when I photograph.

I don’t think most people out there realise the stresses put upon someone who has to move from a state of constant change, to that of being stationary. Those that don’t do this, think it must be a terrific way to live – ‘seeing the world is so exotic’, they may say. While those who do get to experience it often feel dislocated: each time a major trip comes up, I feel it looming for weeks, and I know that I will have to tear myself away from any feelings of being settled that I’ve built up over a few weeks of being back home. The flight tickets are booked and they are fixed in time, yet they seldom synchronise with my moods. If I don’t feel ready to go away, it’s a huge bind for me to do so. Like a child that doesn’t want to get into the bath, I too don’t want to go to the airport. And after a few days or perhaps a week on the road, I slowly realise that I’m actually enjoying my new freedom. I’ve become someone else through spirit of travel and all the new senses it provides. My old self seems like an distant memory – ‘was that really me who didn’t want to leave home’?, I ask. Now I’m in the bath, there’s no getting me out of it.

So I often wonder just why I find the transference from static to mobile so hard at times. I absolutely love traveling but I also really love being home too. I love my friends and my family, yet at the same time, I often find myself hatching new plans to go somewhere new. I think this is nothing unusual for most photographers – when we’re at home, we so wish to be away, and when we’re away, we can often wish to be home.

I’ve realised that I live a life very different from a lot of my friends now, and it’s very different from the life I used to lead when I worked in an office in Edinburgh. I feel I’ve changed as a result of my life-style. For me at least, it’s given me confidence in myself and a broader outlook on just what life is all about. As much as I can feel a sense of dislocation in those ‘transfer moments’ whilst moving from my home life to the life I have on the road, I feel I have found myself many times too, through the experiences that this ‘transference’ stage has offered me.

I can lose myself if I’m stationary for too long, and I can find myself when I put myself in new environments. And the opposite is true too. However, each time I move, I’m challenging my perceptions and I think that’s maybe why I love doing it: travel is perhaps just another way of making photographs. Instead of making visual images, I make emotional ‘imprints’ in my mind – they are what I like to call emotional-images. Less tangible perhaps, but equally valid.

I’m sitting in my hotel room at the Ritz in La Paz, Bolivia tonight. It is now officially the end of a three week photo adventure with six participants.

It’s been a great time and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with the group. Most importantly for me, I’ve just had the pleasure of re-aquainting myself with two very special landscapes – that of Torres del Paine national park in the far south of Chile and the Bolivian Altiplano – an undervalued landscape that is – to my mind – as impressive, if not more so, than many of Iceland’s landscapes. The Bolivian Altiplano is a place to watch for increased popularity for landscape photographers, that I am sure of.

While we were there, we had a full moon, and managed to shoot it during dawn, dusk, sunrise and sunset. The above image was taken on a previous trip way back in 2007. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until later on this year to see my results as I’m heading off to Iceland in a week’s time, so I don’t have any free time right now to get the films processed and begin work on them.

I’d just like to express my deepest thanks to all the drivers and guides who assisted me and my group through these remarkable landscapes. I’d also like to thank my group for the enthusiasm and commitment they showed on both trips. We had such amazing weather – lots of snow and clear mornings in Patagonia while in Bolivia we had amazing pink hues + earth shadows every morning and evening during sunrise and sunset.

I’m now hatching a plan for two repeat trips for next June, and possibly a trip to Easter Island too. I’m also hoping to spend some more dedicated personal time on the Bolivian Altiplano during the course of July next year. It’s an amazing place which I feel hasn’t been fully explored by photographers as yet.

I have over 50 rolls of film – Velvia 50 and Portra 160 to process when I get home. But before that happens, I’m off to Iceland for a month of personal photography time to trek some locations I’ve sorely missed on previous visits.

Life is short. Still,  I guess I can’t say I’ve not used my time unwisely.

I’ll be back on the blog in a few days time once I’m home and over my jet lag.