The Photographer and the Philosopher

The traveler, I decided one day, is part photographer and part philosopher: His aim, as he sets out, is to catch some aspect of his subject—a tilt of head, a glint of eye—that exists out of time, and so to show us, as a portrait-painter might once have done, that aspect of a place that was there when he was 8 and will be there when he is 80; and yet his deeper purpose, what elevates his mission, and makes it more worthwhile, is to take his subject out of space, too, to explore thos…