Savannah, 2025

What makes a place “exotic?” My proposition is that “exotic” is simply the opposite of “familiar” or easily accessible.

Recently a friend posted some comments (thank you Bill Ryan for this idea) about how some of his photography teachers had pushed the idea of photographing one’s own local landscape, but he noticed they all lived next to places like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. He had come around to agreeing about shooting locally, though.

It’s the place you can keep going back to on a regular basis. That does so much to better your odds of catching the right light, the right moment, the unusual moment. Your understanding of the place can be so much more intimate.

So, if I said I made this photograph while we were hacking our way downriver on a tributary of the Congo, you might be intrigued. With a little imagination you might see crocodiles in the shadows of the bank, or hear Tarzan in the distance.

But if I say I’m standing on a well-maintained trail in a state park about ten miles from my front door, it’s no longer exotic, even though nothing in the photograph has changed.

To make “photographing locally” work, you have to suspend the way you see everything through familiar memories, you have to quite seeing the names or “labels” we have assigned to everything, and you have to start looking at just what is there in front of (or behind) you–lines, shapes, textures, tones, colors.

And it helps if you can imagine the crocodiles.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index