With open eyes

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I used to be a travel photographer.

The magazine I was working for sent me to many destinations all over Greece during the three years I was there. It’s a job I left long ago, but I still remember it from time to time. And when I’m in the right mood, I open the hard drive with the thousands of pictures I’ve kept and start wandering through those trips again. The job may be gone, but the travels are still in me, even if I don’t remember many details.

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Looking at those old pictures is a strange experience. They belong to me but not exactly. They belong to a different version of myself. I can tell by the way I framed a scene or by the things I found worth photographing. Sometimes I recognise the person who took them, sometimes I don’t. There are places I had completely forgotten visiting, and others I remember vividly for reasons that have nothing to do with the images. It makes me wonder how much of what we call memory is actually shaped by what we’ve chosen to look at and keep.

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Photography was never just work for me. It was what I was good at, even back in high school, and later it became a way to understand where I stood in the world. I remember many occasions when I would have felt out of place or even awkward without my camera. Even now, when I take pictures just for myself, that same sense of belonging is still there, the feeling that I am doing what I am supposed to do, and that I’m doing it right.

I’m not sure if that makes sense to you, but it’s a thought I’ve carried with me for many years.

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I don’t work for that magazine anymore, or any other, and I don’t think I want to. I’ve lost the motivation, or maybe the tolerance, to work with suffocating deadlines and follow strict briefs.

What stayed with me, though, is the habit of observing, of noticing how the light changes, how people move, how a place feels at a certain hour. Maybe that’s what I learned most from those years, to look carefully.

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The photos from Corfu belong to that period. I took them when I was still running around with that mix of curiosity and responsibility. I don’t remember many details, but I do remember walking through the old town, stopping often, capturing as many pictures as I could.

When I look at them now, I don’t think of the job, the long hours or the exhaustion. I think of the travel itself, of what it means to be somewhere else with open eyes. It’s a feeling that I still chase, even close to home. The sense that the world is always offering more than we have time to see. Maybe that’s why I still keep taking pictures. Not to capture, but to remember. To remind myself that what matters most is not where you go, but how you look.

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_{The pictures were taken on 24–25 February 2010 with my long gone Canon EOS 40D, using a Sigma 10–20mm and a Canon EF-S 15–85mm lens. You can see more pictures from that trip in this post.I edited the photographs in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic.}

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All the pictures and the words are mine.

Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.

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