International Photography & Instruction
I have been extremely fortunate to travel around the world for education, work and enjoyment. The trips, spanning from the Americas to Africa and Asia, have each taught me new lessons in storytelling and experiencing life outside of my own comfort zone. But what made the most recent trips more important was the opportunity to teach students from all over the world the craft of photography and the essential skill of experiencing human connection in a completely different culture.
From 2016-2018, I lead 10 trips in six foreign countries for Rustic Pathways, an international student travel company that believes travel should be an essential part of every student’s education. All but the Myanmar photos are from those experiences.
After leaving my position at Asheville Citizen-Times in September 2015, I started seeking out opportunities to push my boundaries and learn through living. A friend was working in Myanmar (formerly Burma) at the time and encouraged me to visit.
The month I spent traveling all over the country was eye-opening and led me into my work with Rustic Pathways. The citizens had just had their first openly contested elections since 1990, and the world was watching to see what would come next.
Since then, much has happened calling into question Myanmar’s future and its commitment to human rights (see: Rohingya crisis), however, at least from what I witnessed traveling there, the people care about each other and about making a better world for themselves.
For a country about the same size as West Virginia, Costa Rica can feel immensely large and diverse. The so-called Bridge of Central America contains nearly 5 percent of the entire world’s biodiversity, with hundreds of its 500,000 species endemic to Costa Rica. From the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, the cloud, deciduous and mangrove forests, tropical rainforests, volcanoes, rivers and lakes collaborate in creating a kingdom of mammals, plants, insects and environment that astounds.
The Costa Rican people, known as Ticos, profess to be the happiest population in the world. In my four months spent traveling and leading trips there for Rustic Pathways, I now understand how accurate this is. Ticos take every day as a chance, with gratitude and harmony, to live the pura vida lifestyle and to appreciate their space in a vibrant land.
These diptychs represent in small part the way I witnessed and experienced Costa Rica. I hope the juxtaposition of similar and distinct visuals I made while living there during the summer of 2016 challenges and stimulates. The landscape, the people and the movements within the country humbled, inspired and opened up parts of me I never knew existed.
(Note: These images are best viewed on a desktop/widescreen.)
Southeast Asia remains my favorite part of the world I’ve visited so far. The following images are from the Snapshots of Southeast Asia program, which I lead for Rustic Pathways in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in July 2017.
As part of the program, my students, co-leader and I traveled the Mekong River and slept in a floating village, learned about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and explored Angkor Wat in Cambodia. We met monks and found waterfalls in Laos; and we took boat rides in the pouring rain and dodged motorbikes in Vietnam.
The students on this trip grew from basic photographers to having a firm grasp on the manual controls of their cameras and the elements needed for composition and light. At least one of them has gone on to pursue her own career in journalism.
My first experience in Africa was a month in Morocco full of individual travel in Essaouira (at the coast), faculty training in Marrakech and leading the Advanced Photography Workshop for Rustic Pathways throughout the country. Our group traveled from Chefchaouen (the Blue City) to Fez, from the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara Desert and on to Ait Benhaddou and Sbiti.
The Advanced workshop asked much of its students in terms of lesson time, photography assignments and learning how to work as pairs to critique and improve. Morocco also brought another challenge in itself as, overall, Moroccans are camera-shy and tend to avoid photographers. This led into some meaningful cultural discussions with the students as well as the opportunity to discuss photography ethics.
My final trip for Rustic Pathways was leading Intro to Photography in Cuba, a two-week adventure all over our close island neighbor. Cuba felt like a complete opposite experience from Morocco, as the Cuban people are rarely shy of cameras and instead want to be photographed, which led these students to have an easier time on certain assignments.
This trip traveled from Havana to Viñales to Cienfuegos over to Camaguey and Santiago de Cuba and into the mountains where Che Guevara and Fidel Castro hid during the communist revolution.
Cuba is the hottest place I’ve traveled to yet (yes, Santiago de Cuba felt hotter than the Sahara in June - the type of heat you can’t do anything about), and the best place to end my work with Rustic Pathways.
