Why I'm Writing About Travel Photography (And What This Newsletter Is About)
On photography, place, and the art of paying attention
I came to travel photography sideways.
My background is in journalism — I spent years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Florida before moving to Washington, DC, where I worked in public interest communications, ran a nonprofit watchdog organization’s press operation, and eventually helped organizations in the democracy movement figure out how to tell better stories with data. I taught public relations at the University of Florida. I helped launch an institute for visual journalism at Florida International University.
None of that sounds like a path to organizing photography workshops in Hanoi.
And yet. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a camera and discovered that everything I’d learned about storytelling — what makes a story worth telling, what makes an audience care, what makes an image do more than just record what something happened — applied just as well to photography as it did to words. Maybe more so.
In 2017, I founded the Focus on the Story International Photo Festival in Washington, DC. We ran it for five years, brought in some of the world’s best documentary photographers and photojournalists, and tried to make the case that visual storytelling was one of the most powerful tools we had for making people understand things that were hard to understand. I’ve curated and organized several photography exhibitions and published three collaborative photography books — two about protests in D.C. and another about the Great American Eclipse of 2017.
Around the same time, I started organizing travel photography workshops — first to Cuba, then to Hanoi. I’ve now organized more than a dozen of them. I’ve watched people arrive as hobbyists and leave as photographers who finally trusted their own eye.
That intersection — between travel, photography, and the craft of visual storytelling — is what this newsletter is about.
Not gear. Not settings. Not the technical side of things, though we’ll touch on that when it matters. Mostly I want to write about what it actually means to photograph a place. How you move through a city with a camera in your hand and come home with something true. What it takes to slow down enough to see what’s actually there, rather than what you came expecting to find.
I’ll share what I’ve learned from ten years of organizing workshops, from the photographers I’ve worked alongside, from the participants who keep coming back — and from my own ongoing attempt to figure out what I’m trying to say when I point a camera at something.
I’m glad you’re here. Let’s see where this goes.