Photography Monthly Magazine. The Monthly interview - July 2006

WORDS BY LYNNE MAXWELL PICTURES BY PETER ADAMS

Peter Adams travels the world and takes pictures. And people buy them. Not bad for someone who turned pro because he had nothing to lose.

“Bee tanny zurglig avch bolkhaw?” Difficult to read. Impossible to pronounce. Unless you happen to be fluent in Mongolian.

Travel photographer Peter Adams isn't, nor in any foreign language. "I'm hopeless," he admits, but does try to learn this phrase - roughly translated as 'Please may I take your picture?' - in the language of the countries he visits.

"I do not try to take pictures without people knowing," says Adams. "I try to get to know them - admire their dog or their costume - flatter them a bit. The first few frames are very rarely what I want. You usually have to shoot a bit so that people relax. In India, for example, they see a camera and immediately stand to attention and look serious. After a few frames you can have a joke with them and any friends standing round will take the mickey and get them to smile.

In travel it's important to give a positive image, where people are welcoming, and to give them dignity in the way they look.

"Most travel photographers tend to do landmarks. I score because I do people and people sum up a country. It's easy in the Third World and in Latin countries, when they are dressed up for a festival, taking their photo makes them feel special. But in places like America people are more suspicious and have no time. I always carry model release forms in my camera bag, unless I have a guide with me to sort it out.

"More often than not he resorts to sign language, accompanied by a smile and a wave of his Canon EOS IDs Mark II. "Sign language can be an advantage - it's humorous and avoids you having to answer awkward questions when the police stop you. In the end they get fed up and just send you on your way."

Adams switched to digital only a year or so back. He was wary of the quality and the expense of changing not only all his lenses but investing in a second body. "They are so expensive, you could buy a decent car for the same money."It's a far cry from when he launched his business 20 years ago, with 'nothing to lose' and a £40 per week government Enterprise Allowance Scheme grant.

"I wasn't born with a camera in my hands," he says. "Mum gave me one when I was about eight and I was thrilled, but I didn't use it much." He studied Land Management and even worked as an estate agent, but only lasted a year.

Travel is what inspired him - reading magazines like National Geographic -and, for Adams, that went hand in hand with photography.

Off he went to India, backpacking, and when he came back, got a job as a warehouseman. Getting the sack from that was possibly the best thing that ever happened to him.

He says: "I thought 'I can't even hold down a job in a warehouse' and decided to have a go at photography because 1 had nothing to lose."

Working as a freelance he assisted a local photographer in Bristol, at the same time gradually building up his own portfolio and doing industrial work. "It was a struggle for a long while," says Adams, "but luckily, in my first year, Athena bought some poster prints. The royalties were welcome and it gave me a huge amount of self-belief."

"I can't really tell what will sell. Maybe there is one thing on a trip that you know is going to be successful. I just go along looking for good pictures; for images that please me." For example, on his last trip, to Spain, he spotted a guy slumped over his luggage trolley and took the shot for the fun of it. "But it might sell," Adams adds, "perhaps to illustrate travel weariness.

"He sends most of his pictures to agencies like Getty Images, although he also has an extensive photo library of his own. Customers could be magazines, advertising agencies, anyone - not just the travel and tourism industry, which isn't known for its huge pay cheques. Adams says: "Maybe it's to illustrate an annual report on European stocks and shares and they simply want a picture of Paris. I'm looking for generic images, iconic, that sum up a place. Or concepts, like freedom and joy, because people often search the web by concept. I try to get a breadth of images on each trip."

He has traveled to more than 60 countries, some of them, like Spain, several times. Adams will be at home most of the summer as he and wife Suze and their two children are moving house. He wanted to fit in one last trip before being grounded though and two weeks in Spain seemed the ideal solution. "I had Spain in my mind as a good one to do without driving too far - Madrid and a circular tour of villages and towns like Toledo and Salamanca. You can get in a rut - yet another shot of a town square -so I talked to tourist information when I arrived and discovered there was a low key festival in Madrid, with flamenco dancing and people in folk costume."

Preparation is key to good travel photography. "Often I'll feel inspired to visit a place by some pictures I've seen. I'll probably visit the Lonely Planet website to get a rough idea of what it's like, but it's best to talk to people who have been to or lived in the country. Then I'll buy a guidebook and try to work out the best time of year to go - it's no good if the tracks will be muddy and you can't get around."

Once he arrives, he faces a dilemma. "I quite like to leave the cameras and walk around to get a feel for a place and suss out locations. But often your first impressions of a country are the strongest and you need to capture the things that are different about a place straightaway, because otherwise it becomes normal."

He prefers to stay in family-run B&Bs or small hotels than those run by large chains - and not just because of the cost. He'd rather support the local economy than an international conglomerate and, if staying with a family in a village, can just gradually introduce the camera.

That's what happened in Mongolia - the tour company he dealt with had contact with a family, who welcomed Adams into their home.

"As a travel photographer you have to accept hospitality with good grace," he says, "even when it involves being invited into a Mongolian family tent and drinking curdled Yak milk with vodka."

He also cites a sense of curiosity, the ability to get on with people, patience, adaptability, and the ability to go with the flow and keep your temper (especially when faced by bureaucracy), as useful characteristics.
But these are of little use when being driven on a mountain road by a drunk. "I was in the Sacred Valley in Peru and had hired a taxi driver to take me somewhere, but his brother turned up. It was market day in the first village and he was completely pissed. He'd drive really slowly, then maniacally quickly around hairpin bends with 100 foot drops. I persuaded him to let me drive for a while but he ranted and raved and I did not know how he was going to react. Travel -glamorous? No way! You have to be very humble; you are a guest in their country."

Being a travel photographer involves all other aspects too - portraits, landscapes, candids... "Even still life," says Adams. "In Spain I shot glasses of wine on a bar with a plate of olives. I like the variety.

"I have certain ideas before I go away of images that capture a country, but I try to do them in a different way. However, you have to be open to taking snapshots and often they work out better than the ones you worked hard to get, waiting for the light."

That can take two or three days, especially for landscapes and Adams freely admits that he no longer has the patience. "I find it difficult to sit somewhere for three days as I feel guilty about being away."

"With email and the Internet I can also keep an eye on business matters, contact the family back home and do research on the Internet. Mind you, it can make you feel as if you're not really away at all."

Adams tries to limit trips to three weeks duration and allows the same interval between trips. "Work piles up and when I'm home it's intense in the office, in front of the computer. Each image takes about 20 minutes to process, cleaning it up and so on. Luckily I have someone to do that for me; it's a lot of work. I do the initial editing down on the laptop at the airport, but it's better to put some distance between the trip and the final edit. You need a gap or it's too emotional, because you remember the pain involved."

Meanwhile, Adams shows no sign of packing away his passport. "I'm always after that 'wow' factor. And nagged by this sense of wondering what a place looks like. I like looking at maps but want to know what it would look like on the ground. It's very difficult now to take photos of places that people have not been before.

"But the challenge appeals. I was planning a trip to southern Ethiopia -there are these remote tribes with plates on their bottom lips - but then I discovered Don McCullin had just been there. I should have gone five years ago when I first had the idea."

If he hadn't been a travel photographer Adams says he would like to have been a foreign correspondent - the old-fashioned idea of a BBC correspondent, our man in ...wherever. "So, travel would still have been at the heart of what I do."