Photography Monthly Magazine May 2002. Monthly interview

One man's quest to cover the globe. You've not seen the world until you've seen the incredible work of travel photographer Pete Adams.

Tired of taking on boring jobs between travels, Pete Adams turned to photography as a means of financing his global adventures and made a career out of it. Lee Frost caught up with him.

Pete Adams is preparing for his next big trip. In four days time he will fly off to Australia for the best part of a month, travelling first to Brisbane for the lifesaving championships, back to Sydney for six days, up to Queensland for two weeks, then on to Kuala Lumpur. Oh, and on the way out he's arranged to meet up with his old mate, another globe-trotting photographer you may well have heard of - David Noton - for a beer in Bangkok. As you do.

"At this stage, with the prospect of long-haul flights, I don't really want to go," he says. "Before my last trip I had an infected finger that had to be treated and the doctor advised me not to travel. A small part of me was actually quite pleased, because it would have given me an excuse to cancel the trip, but I didn't, recognising I would have regretted it later."

This is a problem that many travel and landscape photographers face. Spending lengthy spells away from home, alone, comes with the job; it's essential and inevitable. But that doesn't mean to say it gets any easier, despite the rewards of exploring the most beautiful and fascinating parts of the world.

"The first few days I'm away I wonder what the hell I'm doing there," he explains. "But once I start getting some decent pictures, I settle into the lifestyle, make friends with the locals and then begin to enjoy myself. I then spend the last part of the trip looking forward to coming home again. It's a familiar pattern that I've learned to live with. E-mail has helped enormously with keeping in touch with family and friends. Hurried phone calls used to leave me frustrated, especially when getting the answering machine!"

Pete's dodgy finger is an unwelcome trophy from his last trip to the exotic island of Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa. "I hired a Vespa scooter to get around, and one day I came off it on a dirt road. I ended up covered in grazes and when I got back to the village this guy sprayed me all over with perfume to sterilise the wounds. He missed one on my shoulder because it was covered by my T-shirt, so it got infected and I ended up with this huge boil in my armpit. The boil on my finger must have been caused in the same way, but it didn't appear until weeks later."So far it has been an eventful few months. Towards the end of last year Pete was in Rio De Janeiro photographing that wonderful city. Since then he's been to Myanmar (Burma to you & me) Thailand, Zanzibar and by the time you read this he will be back home after his trip 'down under'. He was last in Australia four years ago and, as well as liking the country a lot, the pictures he took on that trip have sold well - an important consideration as he does have to make a living from his travels, after all.

"I enjoy getting off the beaten track and visiting less popular places, but if I turn up somewhere and there are no tourists, I do start to worry that maybe the pictures won't sell because there's no market for them."

"Deciding where to go is a real Catch-22 thing," he explains. "I enjoy getting off the beaten track and visiting less popular places, but if I turn up somewhere and there are no tourists, I do start to worry that maybe the pictures won't sell, because there's no market for them."

Fortunately, Pete has reached a stage where the money side of things is less important, so he can spend more time going to places that he wants to see and taking pictures that he wants to take - while at the same time being mindful of the need to produce images that are commercial. Not that it was always this way. Pete's original career plan was as far removed from photography as you could get. He studied Land Management at Southampton, only to find that most graduates ended up working as estate agents - a profession he tried for a couple of years in Bath and Oxford before realising it wasn't for him. Six months spent backpacking around India and Nepal with his girlfriend (now Mrs Adams) sealed his love of travel, then numerous boring jobs followed as a means of financing further trips.Photography had always been an interest, but Pete never took more than snapshots on negative film. Travelling changed this, however, and at the age of 27 he enrolled on the government's Enterprise Allowance Scheme and set himself up as a photographer."I got £40 per week for a year to do this, but to be honest I had no idea. I'd go to London to see magazine editors but they never gave me any work. My portfolio was half-decent though - mainly British landscapes - and in the first year I sold some images to Athena for posters."

At the time, Pete was sharing a flat above a cheese shop in Bristol with six other people while trying to make a name for himself.

"There was a phone, but it only took incoming calls, so I conducted my business from the phone box outside," he recalls. "A photography magazine interviewed me once, and I had to do it from the phone box, with the sound of traffic and so on in the background. It was fortunate that I liked cheese, because the smells wafting up from the shop downstairs could be a bit mean!"

Pete fancied himself as an industrial photographer, so while assisting a local pro part-time and taking on commissions from local agencies, he set himself assignments to improve his portfolio. Unfortunately, Maggie Thatcher was at the height of her power, heavy industry was going out of the window, and instead of photographing shipbuilding Pete was taking pictures of crash barriers, baby food factories and shopping centres.

"It was boring stuff really, and I found myself being messed around, so I decided to change tack."

The idea of shooting stock images appealed - having creative control over his work and being able to shoot what he wanted, when he wanted. So off he went to London to see three libraries.

"I signed up with Ace. The first submission I made was of the shots I'd taken in Nepal a few years earlier, and they took about 70 per cent. This gave me a real boost, and I started to produce a lot of new work. I'd send boxes of slides, and the guys at the library would be like, 'Oh my God, it's another submission from Peter Adams'. They were getting new work from me before they'd catalogued the last lot."

"I really pushed it hard. I did a lot of photography in London. I remember spending five days there shooting, and by the end of it I was knackered. I was hardly getting any sleep, but the libraries would take a lot of material back then, so the more I could produce, the better. I was also curious to discover what type of pictures would sell, so as well as British landscapes I started shooting industrial subjects, agriculture, concepts and all kinds of things. I wanted to cover as many bases as possible."

It was a slow process, but as Pete's income from his stock began to pick up, so he could start travelling further afield, photographing European cities such as Paris and Brussels, Portugal and Greece. By the early '90s he was adding countries such as India, Vietnam, Thailand, Canada and the USA to his list. More recently he has visited Cuba a couple of times, Sri Lanka, Greenland, Morocco, China, Fiji, Bali, Spain, the Maldives, the Caribbean, as well as returning to India on several occasions.

"Cuba is probably my favourite place," he says. "The only word I can use to describe it is sexy. There's this great decay all around, music is playing everywhere, there are loads of bars, the women are beautiful, and the people are really relaxed - they just want to enjoy life. It's so different to the UK."

"I also love India. The first time I went I hated it. I thought it was smelly and dirty and I wanted to come home after about three days. It was such a culture shock - I remember this beggar literally hanging on to my leg. I also got dysentery, which didn't help, but gradually I fell in love with the country and the people - and the food. I've been to India four times now. It's a country where you can never get bored because you never know what's around the next corner."

Within four years, Pete's income from the sales of his work through picture libraries had reached a level where he could shoot stock pretty much full-time, and that's what he has been doing ever since. These days he spends around three months each year away from home, mainly overseas but also on stock shoots in the UK. Once he has decided on a destination, the next stage is to plan his trip and research the place he wants to visit.

"The first thing I normally do is buy a guide book on the place - a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide - and read up on the locations I'm interested in. I will also go on-line and look at tourist board websites, that kind of thing, as well as going through stock catalogues to see the type of pictures that have been taken before. I like to mix up a trip so I can do some people photography, local culture, events, landscapes and maybe a city.

"Once I've booked my flight I can relax. Sometimes I also arrange a car, but I rarely bother booking a hotel from the UK - I prefer to find one when arrive."

Occasionally this backfires. Pete remembers being in Rome once during a local holiday, having to traipse round ten hotels before he found one with rooms.

"India was worse" he adds. "On my first trip there my friend and I arrived in a city at about 6am after a long train journey, so he stayed with the bags while I went in search of a hotel. Down this dusty alley I found one, so I went inside and asked for a room. 'How long for?' I was asked, to which I replied, 'one or two days'. With that, all the doors down the corridor opened and these bleary-eyed women peered out with looks of surprise on their faces. It was a brothel!"

When he's travelling, Pete prefers to stay in fairly basic hotels that are recommended by his guide book; places where's he's more likely to hook up with other travellers, make friends and find contacts.

"If the Rough Guide says a particularly hotel is friendly, I tend to trust it," he says. "Big, modern hotels are too sterile, but the smaller, family-run places are much better and the people there are likely to be more forthcoming with help and advice. Also, I spend so little time in the hotel it seems pointless paying a fortune."

Like most travel photographers, Pete begins a trip with preconceived ideas about the type of shots he'd like to take. However, it's the chance encounters, the unplanned moments, that give him the greatest pleasure. On arrival, he likes to spend a couple of days settling in, getting a feel for the place and overcoming those pangs of homesickness that haunt him on every trip.

"I love the idea of leaving my cameras behind in the hotel and just going for a wander," he says, "But I'm paranoid that if I do there will be an amazing shot just round the corner that I miss. Saying that, the first few rolls of film I shoot are usually rubbish because I'm still getting into the rhythm of being in a new place."

So where will Pete's travels take him for the rest of the year?

"Who knows. I keep telling myself I should plan more, but I never do. The actual planning is hard work so I'd feel more relaxed if I knew what I was doing for the rest of the year. I'll probably go to Italy in May, but beyond that I'm not really sure."

One thing we're sure of is that wherever it is, Pete Adams is guaranteed to come back with some damned good pictures.