Travel Essays by Simon Slater
The following images come from a trip to Korea from my current home of Japan. It represents a nostalgic retread to a familiar city, my previous home – Seoul.
I met the young ladies who comprise the heart of the collection at a tourist site and asked if they’d like to walk a path less traveled for the afternoon. Memory lane was explored anew with fresh eyes and insights.
I met Jewel, a spirited American from the state of Missouri, upon arrival at a cigar plantation in rural Vinales, a Cuban national park two hours from Havana. Although coming to Cuba with solo travel intentions, we gravitated towards a shared sense of humour and easy-going nature.
We took horse rides, storm-soaked journeys on piece-of-shit bicycles, and partied in a nightclub built inside a dripping, illuminated cave. We travelled to central Cuba together and discovered the joys of colour-soaked Trinidad. Many cigars and much rum were thrown into the mix.
At the beginning of what will be an illustrious life of travel, there’s a rich world of discovery ahead of this young jewel from the midwest.
One good reason to travel far and wide is to distance yourself from whatever routine or culture you’ve alligned to and experience life anew.
A trip to Cuba will undoubtedly provide this.
During a stay in the instantly charming town of Trinidad – a crumbling, kaleidoscopic old-world town straight out of a Western (cowboys and all) – I noticed that one of the boys continually kicking around a football on my street had a great eye for a frame, as evidenced by his phone photography. I was about to go for a solo sunset walk when the boys hollered me over (“Amigo!”) to see what pics I’d taken so far that day. After doing so, I urged the budding young photographer, Michel, to take my camera for a stroll and see what he could come up with.
I’d taken plenty of images up to that point so was curious to see what he could capture – what he would focus on, how he’d frame his images and how any potential subjects would react to shutter gaze. We brought his friends along for the short adventure round the hood.
Along with some intriguing street photography showing the interaction between a Cuban boy and his everyday environment, Michel created an incredible portrait of a frail but intense-looking man named Edilio, who was an “Amigo de Che” and still had military badges on his cap to prove it. I don’t believe Edilio would’ve reacted the same way to a thousand outsiders in the way he reacted to young Michel’s lens, partly because of their respective ages but also because they knew each other. The shot was as impulsively captured (first time) as it was posed (fierce, Edilio, fierce!)
If you think the net is oversaturated (it is) with the world’s most in vogue travel photography spots (Cuba) – here’s a fresh perspective.
What follows is Michel’s photowalk.
I met Saki and Aki, two students from Japan’s Kyoto University, a few days into a two-week trip to Cuba. We were buying ice-cold coconuts to sip in Old Havana during the midday Carribean scorch of late August and after a brief exchange, decided we’d spend the day together.
Akiko’s heritage is half German, and Saki was mistaken for Chinese throughout the day by speculative Habaneros. However, them travelling so far from home at the tender age of 21 means that to define individuals by their country or culture is becoming less relevant.
Even if we are increasingly becoming citizens of the world, Communist-implemented travel restrictions mean Cubans are still limited in their exposure to the world beyond this fascinating island. The growing number of tourists like Saki and Aki, however, much like the rising amount of Cubans logging on to various websites in designated public wifi zones around any given town or city, are opening this proud nation’s collective consciousness to new and exciting possibilities.
Toward the end of what seemed like a six-month winter here in the UK came to a close, my friend Oli floated the idea of a weekend to Venice, Italy. Before you could say “ciao bella” we’d booked a brief but much-needed respite from the winter blues. The goal was simple: to wander around Venice and nearby Verona and soak up the sun, architecture, food and those beautiful, harmonious accents.
There was a secondary goal, which I had only remembered once it was happening, and which came to be what I remember Verona for most fondly. An Italian student of mine in the UK had told me to go for ‘aperitivo’, an Italian tradition of drinking and snacking in the early evening due to dinner being eaten from 8pm at the earliest. Oli and I had stopped for a quick, refreshing Aperol Spritz and a rest during a period of wandering, but because of the moreish nature of the orange beverage we ordered another round, served this time with a different snack. Before we knew it, neighbourhood residents, who all knew each other (and seemingly everyone who passed by), had slowly started to congregate alongside us for aperitivo, including a local friar named Bepe, who I chased down for a portrait afterwards.
I hope that Venice and Verona were the aperitivo for my time in Italy, a country that needs much more than a taste to satisfy a traveller’s appetite.
Venice
Verona
On a recent trip to the Big Smoke to see an old flame, I took my camera and stayed a few days. Using the sleepy, leafy, and extremely posh area of Kensington as a launchpad to wander about central London, the excursion culminated alongside the red carpet of the UK premiere of ‘Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri‘, in Leicester Square.
Whilst a year before I was in a portraits frame of mind, this time around I was merely enjoying the pulsating energy which the city emanates in abundance. Big Ben has now been silenced for four years due to maintenance, yet London keeps ticking along like clockwork.
Despite a string of terrorist attacks and the disastrous blaze at Grenfell Tower since my last visit, it seems nothing can quell the pace of the ever-ready capital.
The following images are from a recent trip to the Algarve, southern Portugal. Six old school friends and I embarked on your standard ‘lads holiday’, a British pastime of which I hadn’t experienced for a whole 15 years.
Days were spent relaxing by the pool of the enormous and ostentatious villa we had rented, or sauntering about our base town of Albufeira (trashy/ touristy), Lagos (classy/ not so touristy) and provincial capital Faro (traditional/ surprisingly not at all touristy).
Nights were lost to (pricey) alchohol-soaked bar hopping on the infamous ‘Strip’, and mornings were spent (partly) recollecting the previous night’s debauchery, and how on earth we made it back to (the apparently notorious) Casa Santa Therese…who every taxi driver in town seemed to know of.
Good times.
I took a short trip to Spain at the tail end of a bleak winter in the UK. The first stop was Valencia, during the annual Fallas festival which celebrates the concept of impermanence and renewal.
Elaborate caricatures of celebrities, politicians and famous mythological figures are produced each year to poke fun of the false idols that we are so enthralled by. Needless to say, ‘The Donald‘ had a strong showing.
At the end of the festival, the sculptures go up in flames to signify new beginnings. This ritual takes place both in Valencia city and the surrounding villages and schools, during which time mobs of traditionally-adorned,sangria-induced locals can be seen marching down streets led by brass bands.
Fallas was a complete surprise – it’s the Spanish equivalent of Brazilian carnival. Perhaps a bigger surprise came during my passage through the capital, Madrid, and the nearby medieval city of Toledo, where brief intervals of blue skies frequently gave way to wind, torrential rain, hailstones and snow.
The warm weather that greeted me on my return to the UK, much like the bonfires that raged fiercely throughout Valencia, was a reminder of the cyclical nature of life, no matter how bleak things might seem at the time.
Valencia
Madrid
Toledo
The following set of photographs came after three days of walking around central London.
I took a new camera, the Nikon D750, which served as an incentive for making the trip where the primary goal was attending the opening of a photography exhibition showcasing the work of Lee Jeffries, who I had followed for years.
Lee makes intimate portraits of people on the fringes of society. Among the many street portraits I made in London, which includes a full set of my friend Teni, I was able to make one of Lee before the event started. It may surprise you to hear he uses a 24mm prime lens for his images which is not a typical portrait lens. He uses this because of the sharpness the close distance you can get to a subject’s face.
I’ve since added a 24mm 1.8 prime lens to my collection, not just because of the detail evidenced on Lee’s portraits, but for the pleasing focal range that I prefer over the more popular 35mm, for now at least. Expect some leading line action in upcoming posts or your money back.
For the sake of flow I won’t write anything about the individual portraits here, but I might talk about some of the interactions on Facebook later in the week. If you are one of the subjects reading this now, thank you for your time and patience, hopefully you like the results.
Enjoy 72 hours in the capital.
I met Lononder Teni Backare, aka Teni the Abstract, in Seoul, South Korea, where we both earned our bread and visa status as English teachers. We’d connected through social media and met up in the grungy yet rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of Hongdae. Her passion outside of the classroom was spending her weekends on the streets of Daegu, documenting emerging Korean street styles by stopping strangers on the street and taking their portrait.
With plenty of style herself, and model looks, I wanted to do a shoot with Teni in the rusting alleyways of Chungmuro – host to a wild variety of available light in the evening . Unfortunately we didn’t have time and the stroll around Hongdae was our one and only meeting in Korea.
I met Teni again recently back in the UK on the final day of three exploring the capital by foot. I believe we briefly discussed our lives, before the rest of the fifty minutes we had together was spent conversing in the language of portraiture – ‘look left’, ‘turn that way’, ‘you’re a tiger!’. Actually, Teni didn’t need much instruction at all.
London Bridge gave the Chungmuro alleyways a serious run for their money in the available light stakes – at least during Christmas. I look forward to returning to London this year with a 24mm wide angle lens now in the armada (these shots are with 50mm and 85mm primes) and a little more time to collaborate again with photogenic fashionista Teni.
The evening I received my new full frame camera, the Nikon D750, I took it out for a walk. I made a brief stop at the pub next to my apartment, The Surrey Vaults, because they had displayed a photograph I had taken of a regular behind the bar.
Another frequenter, a Jamaican-British man named Trevor, asked me to take his portraits there and then, which I was more than happy to do. He said that he wanted a shot of him with St Paul’s church in the background, since it was a symbol of his neighborhood.
When my Italian friend Debora returned to Bristol for a few days, she suggested a day trip to a historic pier on the outskirts of Bristol. I didn’t need much convincing to escape the construction drills and sirens of the city centre but was pleasantly surprised how close an oceanic escape was – just a mere 40 minutes by local bus.
Considering that the pier is the town’s only attraction, the icy cold wind that day meant that we were almost the only out-of-towners to pay the three pound entry fee onto the old-world piece of architecture, constructed in 1869.
I’d never even heard of the town of Celevedon, let alone the pier, which Debora was aware of as it had been the shooting location of a famous British boy band. This wasn’t a photoshoot, with a lens in hand and a beautiful Italian girl in view, there was only…one direction…where said lens was going to point.
Speaking of the camera, this was to be the final outing for my Olympus OMD EM1 before I sold it to fund a new venture into the world of full frame photography. The majority of the images on this site were made using the Olympus OMD EM5, a micro four thirds mirrorless camera which gave a performance far beyond it’s toy camera appearance.
So Ciao Olympus, and Ciao Debora…
The Secret Map 