Plenty of people travel for their work; what sets local photographer Rene Treece apart is that her jaunts are adventures, and the travel photos she takes don’t pay the bills. Instead, Treece’s photos are intended to lay the groundwork for future projects.
“Finally I am somewhere that has Internet,” she e-mailed Xpress recently. “It´s been crazy. We left the Caribbean due to floods and came to the Pacific to feel our first earthquakes. I´m just now back in Panama and headed to Isla Boca Brava.”
Her current project? Doorways.
“Since my trip to Morocco, I have been collecting photos of doorways from all around the world,” she explains. “I am hoping to make a book of my favorites in a few years, after I have collected enough.” Her annual trips, which usually run from January or February through April, help build her portfolio, in hopes of turning her travels “into paid work at some point, shooting for a publication.”
But Treece, who makes a living as a wedding photographer and posts her travel photos on her Web site (see below), isn’t just padding her resumé. “I get a new and fresh inspiration with every country I travel to,” she notes.
Her current journey, says Treece, is giving her the chance “to see how the world lives here, get a better understanding of the government, and also to relax, eat as much local fruit as possible.” As an artist, she maintains, it´s important to have a change from the day to day.
Traveling brings inspiration. “The handcrafted art, the faces, the towns, the hills, the blues of the ocean, all blur together to make a kaleidoscope kind of memory that stays with me and leaves me always wanting more.” It’s like the MasterCard tag line that everything can be bought except emotional experience, which is priceless.
“I also feel like every trip changes the way I think, continues Treece. “The stories and history I hear from people firsthand are usually quite different from the history and news we get at home.”
And while she does plan to exhibit her travel photos at some point, for now, this artist is dedicated to collecting exotic glimpses and frozen moments. But to capture gorgeously saturated, pulse-racingly rare footage requires taking the road less traveled.
That’s not a problem for Treece, who loves “staying in a village where there is no electricity, where all the water used is carried in jugs atop one’s head up the mountain path, where the people hand-wash their clothes in a river, where an entire family lives in a one-room house.” At the same time, these breaks from her normal routine give her a chance to miss Asheville. “I´m always riding around on the buses dreaming up new ideas and projects I would like to create when I get back home.”
Info: Rene Treece Photography (305-6724; www.renetreecephotography.com; redgirlphoto@gmail.com).
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