Whilst travelling I have been reading 'Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi' by Geoff Dyer. One of the themes in the book is that once you see below the surface Venice and Varanasi are very similar places. This sounds counter intuitive as you could make an almost endless list of the apparent differences. It is a beautiful day here in Chicago, sun shining, the lake is calm and serene. But once you get underneath the immediate experience and the architectural / cultural overlay it does not feel that different to being in Cape Town, London, or Kolkata. If you travel a lot, walking around one city really does become in the end like walking around any other. If I did not travel for work, or for family, I might stop travelling altogether. The only thing that lifts one city from another is the unexpected encounter. Today it was seeing President Obama, in Cape Town it was a discussion about the liberation struggle. Dyer ends his book with a quote from the Upanishad:
"What is here is also there, and what is there is also here"
All this makes photography difficult - are we just taking pictures of superficialities. Is it possible to photograph the inherent commonalities of places, other than through people living their lives?
An entertaining clip of Geoff reading excerpts from the book to what sounds like an inebriated audience is below.
geoff dyer at shoreditch house salon from Jeremy Riggall on Vimeo.
