What Should I Do With My Travel Images ?

source: personal archives, 2026.

Lately I’ve started going back through my travel photo and video archives. It’s a perilous undertaking. Until now, alongside my notes, I only kept a few photos, picked out of the pile because they seemed interesting at the time, and sent the rest off to sleep at the bottom of a hard drive. Perhaps writing this blog, thinking about travel, the complexity that reveals itself as you study it, and the endless questions it raises, was bound to confront me with my own images sooner or later.

Of course, I regularly question my relationship to travel. I try to observe my posture, the way I think, the things and words that come naturally to me when I set off toward somewhere else. That is a good start. But isn’t it strange that, as a photographer and therefore a producer of images myself, it never occurred to me that analyzing my way of looking at the world should begin with studying the images I have made? Isn’t it even absurd to have spent so much time deciphering writing and thoughts, when I should first have sat down in front of my images to understand where they came from?

I rarely create from precise ideas. Most of the time, the image, or a sequence of images, presents itself to my eye (provided, of course, that I am focused enough), and I set about capturing it. Only afterward, through accumulation, do ideas and projects take shape. Since this work leaves so much room for instinct, it is where my gaze expresses itself before it is rationalized, and so these are the images I should have turned to first when the earliest questions about the purpose of travel arose. Besides, I have always described them to myself as “documentary,” without stopping to think about what the word really means. Yet to document is to observe for a precise reason: with a subject, an object of study, a question put to reality.

So what are my travel images for? What do they mean to say? Do they show the appearance of a reality, or the subjectivity of what I felt when I took them? Aren’t they simply illustrations of a story I build along the way so that I can retell it here? I find myself walking between two precipices: on one side, the glaring cliché; on the other, the documentary that may or may not really be one. Adding new postcards to a world already saturated with images, or sustaining the illusion of documentary reality. Both are terrible, because both lie: they show us an elsewhere that is never truly one, since it passes through the frame and the choices of the person looking, and which, even if it transports us visually, never transforms us the way travel should.

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So I don’t know what to do with my travel images. They speak to me: they bring back memories and inner worlds, they evoke emotions and sensations. But what does that matter to anyone else?

I could present isolated landscapes seen from a train window, or the daily life of a village, and say: “These are just observations of places and everyday life, so this is documentary.”  But being somewhere and photographing your surroundings is not enough to “document.” I see too many works labeled “documentary” in which the changing backdrop is merely a pretext for autofiction. We are taken to a place from which we expect to discover or learn something, and we end up face to face with the author and their images, empty of meaning and context.

So here I am, as I dive back into my archives, at the heart of this dilemma: I cannot in good conscience claim to be documenting anything, and I have no wish to feed the exotic fantasies of travel, already far too present.

What is left, then? There would be a third path, that of embraced subjectivity, the private diary laid open to view. But these images, on their own, could say nothing of what was going on inside me at the time.

So this is what I am left with:

Silence. Keeping these images to myself, letting them rest where they are, taking them out now and then when I’m feeling melancholic. Possibly, but rarely, showing them at a dinner party as proof that the adventure really happened.

Or fiction. Since these images neither can nor should serve documentary or the postcard, their place lies in a world imagined from scratch. A world that, aware it exists only for itself, does not claim to show reality and so lies to no one, and that could thus question precisely this fantasized elsewhere, this distorting mirror that is our gaze and the illusion of displacement that travel can create.

But first, one would have to know how to tell a story…