The place to be for where to go and what to see.
More than a newsletter for travelers, Departures is meant as a rallying point for the rest of my online travel properties. I’ve spent over a decade producing and sharing travel content all throughout the web in the most disorganized ways imaginable. As online platforms have continued to disincentivize images in favor of short form video, photography has been left without a home. Largely after a lot of encouragement from many of you, I have finally decided to sit down and get it all together under one roof. Here, aside from photography you will find everything from quick packing tips to broader destination suggestions, reviews and general advice for both short or long term travel.
Sit back, choose you destination.
Although my plans are to remain active on all the social platforms, I will slowly start sunsetting travel content on my other channels in order to focus on supporting the community here. So regardless of how you got to Departures, don’t forget to subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and some of the exclusive material I will only be publishing on Substack. For years I had looked for an easy to use, mixed media platform outside the social sphere to host my content. For the first time I believe I have found on Substack a product that checks all the boxes and my travel community can call home.
I wish I knew.
Those of you who might have been following me for a while will probably already know my story, even if just bits and pieces of it. But for the ones that just got here, I was fortunate enough to be born to a father who was both a professional photographer and a pilot. To make the long story short, I have been traveling and making photographs since shortly after I was delivered. Several failed attempts at western adult life later, I decided to throw it all away and venture out on a one way ticket to see what the rest of the world was all about and hopefully find myself in the process. All these years and over a million air miles later, I am still completely clueless about who I am, where I need to be or what I am supposed to do when I get there. For the time being and the foreseeable future, much like my father before me, I will continue to average over 100,000 air miles a year and make a living with a camera.
Visual artist by day, same terrible toddler by night.
On most days I’m incapable of sleeping over 4 hours without waking up for food. I can barely control my curiosity, remember anything or communicate in complete cohesive sentences. Always the last in class on anything regarding English grammar, reading and comprehension. I discovered early on that the visual language would be my communication form of choice and camera would be the only means through which I would be able to somewhat effectively express myself to others. For obvious reasons, above and beyond my trade, I have always had one within arms reach everywhere I’ve gone. Needless to say I am absolutely the furthest one could possibly be from a competent writer. As such I have unabashedly made sure to center this entire space around large visuals while maintaining words to a minimum.
To be perfectly honest, maybe you shouldn’t.
Travel is definitely not for everyone. But there has never been a better time to do so. These past couple of years have been particularly hard for both travelers and the travel industry as a whole. But now that the world has opened back up, you might be thinking where you want to go. If that’s you I hope you can find some value in my experiences as well as a glimpse of some of the places I’ve been and love to go. To those who prefer to stay within the confines of their own borders, I hope this space gives you a bit of a peek at some of the wonderful things outside your postal code. I hope it inspires you to finally get that passport you keep pushing out applying for. Maybe even persuade you to book that plane ticket to the first destination on your bucket list. To those few that might be thinking about going all in and traveling perpetually as I have, hope this space gives you a better idea of what the journey actually looks like when the journey IS the destination.
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Featured on:
CNET’s Katie Collins and I discuss the ethics of digital nomadism and the impact digital nomads have in the communities they visit.
I sit down with HuffPost’s Carrie Berk to talk about body inclusivity at fashion week. We discuss how plus-size models and influencers are often excluded from fashion week events, the reality of our current outdated beauty standards and a lack of representation in the fashion industry.
