A VISUAL ESSAY · NINE PHOTOGRAPHS
Places are made of interruptions.
Madrid, Vienna, Jerusalem, a gallery, a kitchen and the shore. The famous view starts the story; everything around it finishes it.
A city introduces itself with a building, then spends the rest of the day distracting you from it. The building is the postcard. The distractions are the trip: the lane you walked down to reach it, the room around the painting, the meal afterwards, the strangers crossing the square after dark.
Magazine picture editors have long built travel stories on that split. An establishing frame says where you are; the frames after it say what being there was like, and they’re usually the ones readers remember. These nine photographs come from different places and years, and they aren’t the record of one journey. What connects them is a habit: let the famous thing set the scene, then pay attention to everything happening around it.
FRAME 01 · MADRID
The Landmark Sets the Scene
Madrid’s Palacio de Cibeles makes a formidable opening statement. Antonio Palacios and Joaquín Otamendi designed it as the headquarters of the postal and telegraph service; work began in 1907 and it opened in 1919, all white towers, pinnacles and ranks of windows. The city government began moving in from 2007, and it’s now Madrid’s city hall. In front, the goddess Cybele rides a chariot drawn by lions in a fountain finished in 1782 to a design by Ventura Rodríguez, with the goddess and chariot carved by Francisco Gutiérrez and the lions by Roberto Michel. It wasn’t always in the middle of the square. It first stood beside the Buenavista Palace, at the start of the Paseo de Recoletos.
In this black-and-white version the sky has gone nearly black, which pushes the pale stone forward. The fountain throws white water into the air while cars, a white van and two motorcyclists cross the foreground. The building wants to be timeless. The traffic has somewhere to go. That disagreement is where the picture comes alive, and it’s the cue for the rest of this essay: once the landmark has done its job, look at what’s moving around it.
FRAME 02 · VIENNA
Arriving Through a Gap
Vienna arrives through a gap. This vertical frame looks down Plankengasse toward the Neuer Markt, with an ochre façade on the left whose windows reflect the houses opposite like small pictures of their own. At the end of the lane, in full light, stands the Donnerbrunnen. Georg Raphael Donner finished it in 1739: Providentia, the figure of foresight, rises in the middle, and around the basin recline figures for four tributaries of the Danube, the March, the Ybbs, the Enns and the Traun. What stands there now are bronze copies from 1873. Donner’s lead originals are in the Wien Museum.
The pleasure here is the gradual reveal. A man walks toward the camera in the shade, overhead wires cut across a cloudy sky, and you don’t get the whole square yet, which is rather the point. An approach like this shows how a place is actually reached.
The square itself, rebuilt for people after years as a car park, has its own guide to photographing the Neuer Markt.
Frame notes. Canon EOS R100, EF 40mm f/2.8 STM, 1/500 s at f/6.3, ISO 160, October 2025. Expose for the sunlit square and let the lane go dark. The contrast is the composition.
FRAME 03 · JERUSALEM
An Interior Needs Its Visitors
Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the view opens abruptly. The dome of the rotunda pulls the eye up to a bright oculus ringed with painted gold rays, while tiers of arches curve down around the Edicule, the small shrine built over the tomb at the centre. Gilded lamps hang at different heights on long chains, and heavy dark pillars bracket the scene like stage curtains.
The Edicule had just been restored. A team from the National Technical University of Athens finished the work in March 2017, at a cost of nearly 3.5 million euros, and the iron girders that British authorities had put up around the shrine in 1947 were finally cut away. This photograph was made that December, so the shrine stands free in it.
Along the bottom, visitors gather, wait, read their guidebooks and look up, and their heads and shoulders make an irregular human base under all that architecture. Remove them and the picture still describes an extraordinary interior. Leave them in and it describes an encounter with that interior, which is what a travel picture is for.
Frame notes. Canon EOS 6D with a 15mm lens, 1/60 s at f/2.8, ISO 6400, December 2017. A very wide lens close to the crowd holds both the dome and the people. Keep the camera level so the pillars curve symmetrically.
FRAME 04 · A GALLERY
A Room Full of Looking
The museum photograph turns attention around. We’re watching people who are watching pictures. Two dark, softly focused visitors stand in the foreground, a guide in a purple sweater speaks into a headset on the right, and in the middle, in an elaborate gold frame, hangs Paul Gauguin’s Arearea, painted in Tahiti in 1892. Two women sit under a tree, figures in the background worship a statue that Gauguin enlarged from a small carving, and in front a red dog sniffs the ground. Another Gauguin, The Meal, hangs to the right.
That dog has a history. When Gauguin showed the painting in Paris in November 1893, the red dog drew plenty of sarcasm, and the exhibition went badly. He still counted Arearea among his best paintings and bought it back himself at an auction in 1895, before leaving Europe for good. It belongs to the Musée d’Orsay today.
The deep green wall lets the orange-red dog flare forward, and the room has quietly assembled a colour scheme of its own: purple sweater, green wall, gold frame, orange dog. The visitors hide part of the display, yes, and they also give it a present tense. Art doesn’t spend all its time alone in an empty room.
Frame notes. Canon EOS 6D Mark II, EF 40mm f/2.8 STM, 1/100 s at f/2.8, ISO 4000, a Thursday evening in April 2024. No flash in galleries; a fast lens and a high ISO do the job.
FRAMES 05 AND 06 · FRUIT AND FIRE
The Eye Can Travel Without Going Far
From the gallery to the kitchen is less of a leap than it looks. The plums crowd together in yellow, rose and red, and most still wear their bloom, the pale, dusty coating a plum makes for itself, which rubs off at a touch. Seeing it is a small sign the fruit hasn’t been handled much. The translucent plastic box is still there, an ordinary container doing nothing to dignify the scene. It doesn’t need to.
Beside that cool, close view, the grill is all depth and heat. Fish and a spatchcocked chicken sit over glowing coals, the bars score the foreground, a pan of sauce waits on the right, and a cook in a white hat works behind the glass, in front of a wall of blue-and-white patterned tiles hung with framed pictures. Spatter on the glass and a haze of smoke soften the room without hiding its clutter. Two versions of abundance: one held still, the other being transformed. There’s more of that kitchen in Over the Coals.
Travel memory is full of this supposedly secondary material, the fruit bought for later and the view through a restaurant window before choosing a table. Both pictures were made on phones, which is how most of this material gets made, and both deserve room in the archive even if nobody prints them on a ticket.
Frame notes. Plums: Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, 1/100 s at f/1.8, ISO 500, September 2026. Grill: Samsung Galaxy A72, 1/50 s at f/1.8, ISO 400, October 2023. With a phone, get closer than feels polite and fill the frame; small sensors reward simple, close subjects.
A monumental façade tells you where you were. The fragments bring back what it felt like.
FRAME 07 · THE SHORE
Stone Changes Its Job at the Shoreline
In the city, stone holds a façade upright or raises a shrine above a crowd. Here it’s somewhere to spread a towel. The pale rock breaks into ledges, cracks and dark channels, and the water runs from deep blue to bottle green where the bottom rises. People stand at the edge, sit by their bags or lie across the uneven ground, and their turquoise, purple and striped towels make temporary islands of colour.
There’s no central subject, and the photograph doesn’t pretend otherwise. It asks the eye to wander, following a fissure toward the sea and coming back to a small human gesture: a figure in red standing to look out, someone flat on their back near the water. From above, the bodies read as marks on a map. After so many windows, arches and frames, the looseness feels like a release. The same afternoon appears in Where the Rocks Meet the Sea.
Frame notes. Canon EOS 6D Mark II, EF 28mm f/1.8 USM, 1/400 s at f/7.1, ISO 100, June 2019. Hard midday light is unkind to faces. Pointed straight down at rock and water, it works: shadows shrink and the sea shows its colour.
FRAME 08 · A PHOTOGRAPHER
And Then Someone Raises a Camera
The woman with the camera is caught in a practical moment. Her dark hair fills the left side of the frame; one hand holds it back, the other cradles a Sony with a big lens, and her face is turned to the viewfinder and away from us. Green foliage and pale stone melt behind her.
It’s a picture of concentration with an interruption built into the gesture. Photography often looks like this from the outside: someone trying to see properly while hair, light and the rest of the world get in the way. It’s also a reminder that at any landmark, half the people in the way of your picture are busy making their own.
Frame notes. Canon EOS 6D Mark II at 200mm, 1/1250 s at f/5, ISO 100, June 2022. A long lens from a distance lets you photograph a concentrating person without breaking the concentration.
FRAME 09 · NIGHT
The City Carries On After the Last Postcard
Two runners and a black-and-white border collie cross the night-time paving. A leash draws a line between them, their shadows stretch toward the bottom edge, and a row of bike hoops repeats along the kerb. Headlights, a bus sign and street lamps scatter different colours across the stone, and a man sits on a bench at the far left. Nothing here has the clean hierarchy of the palace at the start. The runners, the dog and the parked bikes make the place legible in another way, as a city being used at an hour when the visitor’s programme is long over.
Frame notes. Canon EOS R100, EF 24mm f/2.8, 1/200 s at f/2.8, ISO 6400, September 2025. Raise the ISO before you slow the shutter; runners need 1/200 s or faster.
A Shot List for the In-Between
The Approach
Photograph the lane, the steps or the tram stop before the landmark appears. It tells people how the place is reached.
The Room Around It
Turn round in front of the famous thing and photograph the people looking at it. Their faces are part of the visit.
What You Ate
A meal, a market box, a bag of fruit. Shoot it close and early, before it’s eaten or moved.
The Hour After
Go back out after dinner. Cities change character at night, and so do the people using them.
You remember the tower. Then, unexpectedly, you remember the purple towel on the rocks.
That’s the sort of memory worth making space for.
Keep looking. Stop Waiting for an Empty Frame argues for the people in the way, and The Geometry of Everyday Life finds the shapes under six unlikely subjects. The night frame is worked through in White Balance in Mixed Street Lighting, and the Jerusalem interior also appears in How to Source Images for a Travel Magazine.