Last plane for the travel photographers!

Is travel photography a now past occupation? At this hour and at this day (March 27, 2020) every country is quietly closing its frontiers to foreigners and even to its own people that have been too late to catch the last flight available. One week ago, I was part of the first groups of people to be repatriated with the new airplane in-board rules that have seemed to be surrealist on the moment. They are now a standard process in the very few incoming flights to come.

What will be the world in the coming months and years? Nobody really knows! For one, the innocence of past travelers who have candidly explored the planet is a thing of the ... past! Nobody will ever be felt that full confidence about its own security, at least for sanitary obvious reasons. But there is more than a simple touristic impact from the recent events. There is also a very local one. Suspicion is now part of us very near neighborhoods. So, it is not only travel photography that is in jeopardized but any out-going photography (street, casual, etc.).

If we understand the logics behind the confinement measures, we have not really apprehended how they can be fully articulated in our day-today life. Simple acts of our basic social behavior have been abolished without any kind of substitution effort. Suspicion have replaced curiosity and it will take time to get a more relax human approach to other even with the familiar ones. Can photographs be able to take the relay of your on-sight relations? May be or maybe not. We don’t know what the common sentiment regarding socializing versus individualism will be.

During the last moments of our night return flight, I was observing through my airplane window the aerial view of the Montreal city with its empty highway roads and knowing how the traveling activities of any kind will drastically decrease almost to an unbelievable stand still. You know intuitively that, at this precise moment of time, there will be a day before and a day after.