Anchorage G Street Outtakes

by Mark Meyer · Posted in: musings · new images · media

Travel photography tends to be about capturing the differences you find, either in the landscape or culture or food, between what you live with and what you find when go somewhere else. This makes a travel piece about your home town a challenge because we discount the amazing things around around us, always thinking that photography would be easier if we could just travel. As you walk around Anchorage in the summer you see tourists from every part of the world in rapt wonder, cameras at the ready, because it's all so interesting—to them. But when you see it every day, you simply stop looking. Overcoming the creative languor of shooting near home turns out to be exercise in reacquainting vision with surroundings, which when the pressure is on, is harder than I expected. The pressure was on recently while shooting an assignment for the New York Times travel section about Anchorage. The point of the piece was that Anchorage is a pretty cool place with all sorts of things for the traveller beyond the quintessentially Alaskan. Anchorage is a great place and the assignment was tons of fun, giving me an excuse to get to know some of the local establishments and people in a way that always seems easy to postpone when you're in your home town.