The Voyages Issue: Remarkable Journeys With Six Photographers

My birth as a photographer took place in Africa: The first assignment I ever took was in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the Danakil, a desert in Ethiopia, I felt this very real sense of nowhere, as if I were suspended in time. It is such a wild place, and feels like the heart of Africa. It’s the region where Lucy, the famous hominin, was found; it was the start of humanity, and it feels like it. But it is also such an extreme place to visit, one of the hottest in the world. You can really only go during three months of the year — between December and February — and even then it was so hot, I couldn’t do anything after the morning. I felt terrible at first, but then something happens — you get used to it. The area feels prehistoric. You have all this light: It’s white and dusty, and there becomes a kind of charm to a place without colors. But then you go a little farther from the salt plains, and the landscape becomes a psychedelic experience, all greens and reds and veins of minerals. And then there are these other moments that were very dark, almost black, because we had to arrive in the middle of the night to see the volcano. This was a visual journey, to go from white to color to dark. It’s the cycle of photography. The landscape really took me out of my comfort zone. It is an atmosphere like hell. The noise of the lava, the gurgling, is incredible. It’s one of the only countries in the world that lets people so close to the crater of the volcano. I could feel my feet burning, and at one point one of the legs of my tripod was melting from the heat of the ground. But there were moments so full of joy and so pure, like when my guide Ali ran into his friend in the middle of nowhere, this vast white desert, and they were so happy to see each other. They did the keke dance, a dance of joy. He told me that when you meet an old friend, you dance like this, with your hand in the air. It was so beautiful, because it was so unexpected.

The first time I went to Albania was in 1997, to cover the country’s riots during the collapse of financial-pyramid schemes there. I fell in love with it. It was like stepping back in time 50 years. Between then and 2000 I visited the country 13 times, always on assignment as a photojournalist for the newspaper where I worked in Denmark or for other media outlets. Last year I went back. In the meantime, I had become a really good cyclist, so when the opportunity came to do a road trip by bicycle, Albania was where I wanted to go. I wanted to see what had changed and what hadn’t. I wasn’t even sure if I could do a road trip by bicycle there, but I used a GPS app, Strava, that’s like a social network for athletes, and through that I hooked up with some of the top Albanian cyclists. They helped me plot a trip south from Tirana, to the east, with a finish in the west. My goal was to do about 60 miles a day. They helped me to figure out which roads might be really good and nicely paved or full of holes and gravel. There were a lot of both! And there were many epic climbs through the mountains. Some of the cyclists rode alongside me for a few days. One guy, a doctor, even rode with me for the whole week of my trip, through places I hadn’t been to in over a decade, places that had meant a lot to me and places I’d never been, down to the beaches on the Greek border that I was happy to see were booming with life. My goal wasn’t to make a social documentary; I wanted to make a story in pictures of a tourist’s bicycle trip through Albania. And that’s what I did.

The first European to cross this region, the English explorer Edward John Eyre, in 1841, said at the time that it was a “hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams.” This made me curious to go. Nullarbor means “no trees” in Latin. If you’re crossing Australia through the south, you have to go through this crazy region where the climate is really intense — it can be 120 degrees or below 0 — and the people are wired differently. I didn’t want to show the Australia we typically see: the Great Barrier Reef or the crocs or kangaroos. I wanted to do a road trip across this place where there seem to be more questions than answers. So it was just me in a rented caravan, with a little fridge stuffed with reasonably O.K. things to eat, blasting tunes, mostly classic rock; some songs I’d listen to eight, 10 times in a row, especially Led Zeppelin. I was riding this strange highway that’s both a utility road for trucks moving goods and heavy machinery and a badge of honor for tourists — the bumper stickers say “I crossed the Nullarbor.” For 12 days and 1,700 miles, making stops along the way, I met other people out there trying to find something, or get away from something, as everyone I met in the Nullarbor seemed to be.

I was looking for a new place to go be outside in nature, and then I heard about the cloudberries of Lapland in northern Finland. Cloudberries are like some magical fruit — a tart, orange-gold berry, growing just one per stalk — that sets off an annual foraging hunt in July and August. In Finland, people are obsessed with cloudberries. Some have all these secret places they’ll go to find them — little jangat, they’re called, Finnish for “boggy areas” — that they won’t tell anyone about and that they’ll return to every year because they can find the best cloudberries there. I wanted to feel what it would be like to be part of that hunt that goes back so many generations and to be able to tromp through forests that seem as if they grew out of someone’s imagination. Northern Lapland is above the Arctic Circle and best known for its association with Santa Claus, and of course for its snowy white beauty and northern lights in the wintertime. In summer, the place is a photographer’s dream, because there’s more than 20 hours of daylight. Being there felt like being on the wild fringes of Europe. There’s open bog land, lakes and mountainlike fells where the reindeer herds roam and breed. Finland has this very cool rule called something like “Everyman’s right,” which means that anyone has the right to respectfully forage on anyone else’s property. The rule is also in Denmark, at least according to my aunt, who grew up there, where it is something like “You can take whatever you can fit in your hat!” When cloudberry season hits, the berries stay ripe for only three weeks. So people put on their big rubber boots, pack food and their kettles to make coffee and strap on their homemade knives, which they all dangle from their waists to cut whatever they need — sticks for the fire or sausage for the grill. Then everyone just drops whatever else they’re doing and piles into cars, canoes or A.T.V.s to join in the search for the elusive cloudberry.

My family comes from Uruguay, and my grandfather was an architect who developed urban communities in Latin America. He was an amateur photographer as well, and I remember, growing up, my grandmother showed me all these slides of his travels, including to Machu Picchu, on light boxes. This is why I wanted to become a photographer. My going to Machu Picchu felt like a pilgrimage — in some ways connected to my family, but also just for me. The trek gives you a sense of how big the Inca Empire was ­— it’s incredible to see a piece of this huge civilization. They managed to grow crops in different altitudes and different climates and build these villages. All the Inca trails and paths around the Andes were built to get to Machu Picchu. For seven days we didn’t see a shower, a motorbike, a plane, a cellphone. We just saw nature. About halfway through the trek, there were some thermal baths coming from the mountains. Yet the rivers are really cold, like snow. You have to get all the right clothes for many different climates — it’s freezing at night, and incredibly hot in the day. You are more with yourself. I tried to take pictures without thinking much — I just wanted to be floating. It was hard to breathe in this altitude. Your brain is not thinking properly; it operates differently. I shot in black and white as a homage to a Peruvian named Martín Chambi, an indigenous photographer who shot all around the Andes in the mid-20th century. I tried to push what he did into the contemporary landscape.

The rumored discovery of the tomb of St. James, the apostle to Christ, in northwestern Spain around 814 was especially miraculous because it almost immediately lured men and money east of the Pyrenees into an Iberian Peninsula that had been overrun by Muslim invaders. These forces had conquered everything but a ribbon of hardscrabble land across the north. In time, that barren pilgrims’ route accumulated layers and layers of history. The monks of Cluny, whose monasteries eventually dotted the trail, discovered that people in motion caused a godsend of new funds, later known as a tourist economy. The road was a 500-mile stage for traveling rhapsodes and juglares, whose songs were written down as “The Poem of the Cid” and “The Song of Roland.” It also served as a walking prison, as judges handed down pilgrimages in lieu of criminal sentences. Over the centuries, the route became one of the premier walks on earth — still up there today with the Incan trek to Machu Picchu, climbing Mt. Fuji or the Appalachian Trail. Its medieval reputation as a singular quest, as opposed to the main competition back then of Jerusalem and Rome, compelled Dante to write that “none is called a pilgrim save he who is journeying toward the sanctuary of St. James” — a notion that has offered any troubled serf, whether harried by feudal agriculture or an iPhone, the chance to discover how the bipedal drudge of a pilgrim’s daily pace gives way to a kind of shedding, literal and otherwise, so that in time what the person sees is not an epiphany or a vision but an occasional glimpse of a self buried long ago beneath layers and layers of history. This spring, the photographer Raymond Meeks walked the road to find an unlikely connection between his own physical pace on the ground and what he saw through his lens. “I had been doing a lot driving and photographing — looking for details that would draw most of us in, sucker shots really, that would stop any passerby,” Meeks told me. “So I wanted to walk and enter a rhythm where you see something that you normally would not encounter when moving at a faster rate. I wanted to give attention to those places and make pictures birthed not so much by a detail in the landscape as an interior feature, more where I was at the moment, so that the exterior picture becomes more an image of an interior landscape.”