Friday, June 26th 2009
 
A collection of photos by Nathan Buhr
 
"Nathan Buhr is a self-proclaimed 'Budget Jet-Setter.' He fell in love with traveling while attending the 2nd grade in Paris, where his family lived for six months. While still attending college, a friend suggested that he might have some family they could stay with in Europe... and off they went. Since graduating with an Art degree emphasizing Photography from Bethel College, Buhr has been splitting his time between Wichita and and the world, with the only constants being himself and his camera.
 
The Journey is the Destination but the Journal is the Goal is a collection of photographs taken during the past 2½ years, over the course of four continents, ending with six months in Small-College-Town, Poland (somewhere between Warsaw and Berlin).
 
So often on trips abroad people shuffle from one land mark to another without really finding the culture in between. In this collection Buhr is suggesting that just wondering around is the best way to actually get a feel for the places you go and to let them change you.
 
The difference between travel shots and this collection is that vacation slide shows are filled with “stuff” instead of experience. Viewing the depiction of the “stuff” that makes up a trip without seeing the trip itself is like reading the climatic middle pages of a novel without knowing anything else about the story. In essence, since you miss all the important stuff, what you read tells you nothing, no matter how pretty it is.
This collection explores exploration. More specifically, it depicts the way in which one is changed by the intentional interruption of usual cultural influences, and how the exploratory experience fills the sensory vacuum left by that interruption. People know that after a journey, they're different. Buhr's collection deals with the fact that when we set out to see the world, the world changes how we see; it broadens our horizons, gives us a crash course in problem solving, and through the independence of setting out alone, it ultimately unites us...."