For more than a decade, my profession has taken me around the world to work on travel photography assignments. With the exception of Antarctica, I’ve reported from every continent. While mass tourism has been around for a long time, over the years I’ve borne witness to how holidaying is evolving. This came in to sharper focus in 2024, when I took on a 6-month commission for a major travel company to document Spain’s Mediterranean coast and it’s capital, Madrid.

As I endeavoured to capture inspiring, beautiful scenes for my client, I observed the people around me and their relationship with the places they had chosen to visit. I saw queues of people waiting to have their photograph taken by a particular piece of street art in Barcelona; a middle-aged woman changing into three different outfits to have her photograph taken by her husband in front of a cute cottage in Peñíscola; throngs of visitors jostling for position to take selfies in front of a captive gorilla at a zoo in Valencia. My lasting impression was that for many modern day tourists, the world, with all its intricacies and contradictions, is merely a stage, a series of sites that act as a backdrop for the main protagonist – the self.

Increasingly, I have asked myself whether I am a part of the problem, and if I am, what should I do about it? It’s a difficult question to grapple with. My instinct as a documentarian is to engage with this changing landscape – what are the physical and societal side effects of these shifts in how tourists experience a place?

‘The Photographers’ is my first foray into documenting one of these phenomena. On a recent family trip to Malaysia, I noticed numerous local men, equipped with jerry-rigged iPhones, hustling for commissions to photograph tourists in front of the Petronas Towers, the country’s most visited landmark. These photographers, predominantly from the remote region of Sabah, had found employment servicing a particular demand – the obtaining of a perfect photograph for social media, where the iconic landmark battles for attention with the protagonist.

Over the course of two days, I photographed sixteen of these men, and their carefully constructed camera rigs. I also asked each of these photographers to photograph me. The work speaks directly to the global power of photography in a world of social media – where travel is as much about the resulting image as it is about the location itself.

I’m indebted to Vignes Balasingam for his assistance and translation work on this project.