How many words is a picture worth?

People seem to get busier every day. We need fast and easily delivered information, we can’t waste time with long texts and many don’t have time –or patience- for the words. We can be sorry for the last ones, but the truth is that, even more than ever, we live in a visual world.

If a picture is worth a thousand or ten thousand words, it can be said that a piece of travel writing without photography has become something impossible to imagine. However, does any shot do the job of talking for itself? I believe that the principles applied for travel writing also count for travel photography.

We should avoid the clichés, capture the unexpected showing reality through new angles and be very careful when using Photoshop (are we going to take the documentary or the PR angle?).

My own good and bad examples, on the broad subject “Rome”.

Who still needs to see this kind of picture on a travel piece?














What about these ones? What do they say?
















(* don't touch me)

I couldn’t finish this post without mentioning National Geographic’s pioneering work on travel photography. It has inspired travel photographers around the world since the advent of photography, in the C19th.

Photo: en.wikipedia.org (Machu Picchu, published in the National Geographic in 1911)

Describing the world

Travel writing has been closely linked with the exploration of the world since its very beginning. So, it can certainly be assumed that ever since the human being could write and travel, there has been the necessity of reporting the experience.

"The Voyage of the Beagle”, written by Charles Darwin during his famous five-year trip and published in 1839, is a good example but definitely not the oldest. During the Age of Exploration, the travels undertaken by the Europeans to the New World always had a person whose task was to write about the new findings. When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500, Pero Vaz de Caminha wrote a 27 page letter that is considered the first “official” travel text about the country. Perhaps, Marco Polo was history’s most famous travel writer. In his travels he wrote of journeys in Asia between 1271 and 1295, where he was a guest at the court of Kublai Khan.

The first travel texts were very descriptive and that would be enough. As nowadays there is nothing or little left to be discovered around the world, a successful piece of travel writing must have much more than a description of the place. First of all, an original angle has to be discovered, as nobody has time to waste with old novelties and travel clichés.

While exploring the chosen angle, it is not a bad idea to bear in mind the principles of documentary and photojournalism - unless you have been commissioned by a tourism board and need to perform a PR task.

Illustration:en.wikipedia.org (page from the book "The Travels of Marco Polo" originally published during Polo's lifetime)

Feature: travel writing

I decided to write the feature on travel writing. I like to travel, obviously, and I have been doing a lot of freelance work in this area. Also, I am just about to launch my first book on this subject, next January in Brazil.

My forthcoming posts will be more or less like this:

I’ll first give an overview of the beginning of travel writing, commenting on angle, purpose and style then and now. I also intend to write about the relationship between documentary, photojournalism and travel writing, as well as the importance of pictures and how I believe they should be used. Finally, I’ll review some British travel publications and talk about my personal experience in the field.

Photo: Giovana Zilli (Bombinhas, Brazil)

The group blog - a critical evaluation

A blog about international news sounded just perfect, considering the international background of our group. Our basic idea was to analyse what was being reported in the British media, from this angle.

The target audience of Our Global View were students, people interested in international news and foreigners living in the UK. A continent was allocated to every member of our group and I enjoyed the experience of researching about South American news everyday. I knew beforehand that my continent is often neglected in European media, a fact that I could confirm during the five-day-blogging period. So, I ended up reporting news (published through South American outlets) more than analysing what the British media was saying about South America.

Posting everyday was quite time consuming, especially during the busy time at the end of semester but as I said before, I enjoyed it! The blog platform chosen was definitely not the best one, because it limited our freedom to edit and overwhelmed the editor of our blog, who had to do the entire posting alone. Another thing that was not so good about the platform was its unchangeable opening page. This was reflected as well on the linking process, as all of us would have the same single link for all posts, which would not allowed other bloggers to link with directly with them.

I think I managed to bring to our blog a good sample of what was going on in South America, and I was quite pleased to see that some posts drew comments. They were about my first post on the Brazilian floods and I should have responded to them, but I completely forgot about that.
Considering the positive and negative points, I can say that the experience of group blogging was quite interesting, and I have learned a lot from it.

Illustration: jeanmonnetprogram.org

Twitter: the uses and abuses of a gadget

It is amazing the amount of gadgets you can use in your blog nowadays. Ho-we-ver… I wonder, what is the relevance of knowing that somebody is having a full bowl of cereals and berries for breakfast?

So, the question shouldn’t be “What are you doing?” but… “Do you have anything interesting to share?”

Twitter can be of great use for journalists, no doubt about it (even Downing Street is twittering). But making the most of it doesn’t mean to update it every hour or day, if you don’t have anything relevant to say! And as Will McInnes says, Twitter is addictive, so… use it, but don’t be used by it!

Illustration:geek and poke