Ahron de Leeuw's photostream

Actually these travel photos are taken by me and by my wife Barbara. For years we were free as two birds. But now that we have two little daughters and we will be bound to our house for some time, it's flickr that let's me travel instead. And instead of taking pictures I take favs. Barbara however is hardly interested in what's going on on flickr.
So the postings lean for some time on older travels: I am awaiting the moment that we set out again, curious as our kids.

I believe photography and travelling have a lot in common.
One can raise the same questions about both.
Both being such a superficial immersion in a reality really unknown, I can not say whether travelling/photography in the end is merely escapistic
or gets you out of the ordinary ordinary into some self-imagined essential ordinary.
The latter at least calls the imagination, triggered by some things apparently shared all over the world yet new and freshly seen through the big eyes of a child.
But we know such imagination can dangerously set us astray. How can focussing on a reality of someone else unknown, rather than your own, bring you closer to some truth? Does running away not trick us into some cheap sense of (visual) beauty that's only beautyful because you are detached, making you a mistaken collector of fairy tale truths?
On the other hand, the forces of globalisation are too quick catching up, emancipating and transforming the material of human life to an abstract level that merely leaves us such mistaken fairy taile truths about that human life's antecedents anyway.
(For example consider the origin of religions. It's hard to imagine any new religion being born outside the realm of Internet.)
So I hang to these far away impressions and I desperately long to set out again - spending all this time on flickr in the mean time.

Ahron