Learning to move through places with those who know them
I am often only somewhere briefly.
A few days, sometimes less. Long enough to walk, to look, to get a first sense of how a place moves. Not long enough to understand its shortcuts, its rhythms, or where the light settles once the day slows down. In those situations, spending time with a local photographer feels less like guidance and more like borrowing a way of being present.
It usually starts simply. Walking together. Watching where someone pauses, which side of the street they choose, when they decide to wait instead of moving on. The route is rarely about highlights. It is about access. Language helps. Familiarity helps more. Sometimes it is just the quiet confidence of someone who knows when it is appropriate to ask, and when it is better to keep walking.
I experienced this most clearly in Cuba, during a multi day journey that still holds some of my strongest work. Cuba felt like a world with its own internal logic, one that was difficult to read as an outsider. Hospitable and open, yet shaped by systems I could not easily place.
More than once I was told the same thing, usually with a smile. Don’t ask why. After a while, I stopped trying to connect everything and focused on what was in front of me.
Walking with a local photographer made that possible. He knew when to linger and when to move on. Which conversations could unfold naturally and which questions were better left unasked. That shift mattered. I stopped trying to understand the system and started paying attention to gestures, routines, the way people related to their work and their tools.
In Delhi, that friction would have been overwhelming on my own. The narrow streets fold into each other quickly. Sounds overlap, directions dissolve, and orientation disappears within minutes. Walking with a local photographer changed that completely. We moved with purpose, stopping for street food, exchanging short conversations, passing through spaces I would not have entered alone. After a short while, the city became less of a maze and more of a sequence. The photographs I made that morning came from that shift.
Lanzarote offered a different kind of access. There, it was not about finding my way, but about being invited in. A local photographer introduced me to people he knew personally. Conversations stretched. Doors opened. We ended up inside homes, spending time without watching the clock.
Marrakech taught me something else entirely. In the medina, light does not arrive evenly. It breaks apart. Sharp highlights, deep shadows, sudden transitions. Learning to work within that contrast, instead of trying to soften it, turned out to be useful far beyond that city.
The photographs made on days like these are not always the most resolved ones. That is fine. What matters more are the habits that settle in quietly. Ways of reading light, of approaching people, of understanding when to step forward and when to hold back. Those are the things that remain useful long after the trip itself has ended.
