BETWEEN IDEAL & REALITY
The series explores the contrast between expectation and lived experience, considering how places are imagined before they are encountered and how perception shifts.
When I began Between Ideal & Reality, I had a clear plan.
I wanted to return to making photographs slowly and with intention, photographs that held attention rather than competed for it. I planned to work exclusively with a Hasselblad camera, photographing in black-and-white film. Slowness and restraint were central to the process. Light and shadow were meant to shape the work, and the act of photographing was intended to support presence rather than draw attention away.
The camera itself mattered.
When we photograph through layers of glass, screens, lenses, and interfaces, a physical distance is introduced between ourselves and what we are experiencing. Working with a Hasselblad is different. The way it is held at the waist rather than in front of the face slows the process and requires physical engagement, with a series of deliberate steps that feel almost ceremonial. Looking down into the camera rather than through it keeps the body present, aware of its surroundings, and grounded in the moment.
Film demands commitment.
Intention.
Time.
Trust.
Presence.
Each frame carries weight. There is no immediate correction, no endless reworking. The image exists before it is seen again. That process, the discipline of attention, was meant to be part of the final work.
That IDEAL did not hold.
Shortly after arriving in Athens, the camera was damaged beyond repair. With it, the original plan disappeared. What remained was uncertainty, disappointment, and the need to continue without the process I had carefully constructed.
A backup digital camera became the only option.
What followed was not a compromise, but a shift. The work stopped being about the tool and became about observation. I began to notice how different the places we were seeing felt from how I had imagined them. Moments of alignment would appear briefly, only to be interrupted by something ordinary or unexpected.
The work moved away from the curated and idealized imagery often associated with travel and toward what existed alongside it. Even working digitally, I remained conscious of staying present and deliberate while photographing, resisting the impulse to review or repeat exposures and allowing each image to be made with intention as I originally set out to do.
Air conditioners mounted to white façades.
Modern infrastructure woven into ancient architecture.
Crowds waiting for their turn to photograph the same view.
Ordinary life unfolding within a place shaped by expectation.
It became clear that what was most revealing was not disappointment, but the beauty of reality.
As the series developed, I began thinking of the images as postcard adjacent. Many are presented in pairs. One image carries visual familiarity, a composition, colour, or light we recognize and expect. The image beside it shares those same qualities, yet offers a different view.
Instead of the postcard, the viewer is presented with what sits just beside it.
These pairings are not intended as corrections or condemnations. They are moments of proximity, where expectation and lived experience coexist without resolution. The familiar image establishes the visual standard. The adjacent image introduces reality. Together, they invite the viewer to notice what draws their attention and what is often overlooked.
Between Ideal & Reality is not about destination, nor about rejecting images or imagination. It is an exploration of how places are imagined before they are encountered, and how perception shifts through experience and really looking.
This series does not attempt to complete the experience of place or travel. It allows space for interruption, contradiction, and uncertainty, acknowledging that what remains is often more complex and more lived in than the image we arrive with.
Often, the most honest experience of a place does not live in the postcard.
It lives beside it.
