At some point I took a photograph of a plate of pasta and thought: what am I going to do with this.
Not in an existential way. Practically. I had two thousand photographs from that trip. The pasta was photograph one thousand and forty-seven. I had never looked at photograph one thousand and forty-six and I was not going to look at this one either.
I deleted it before I had even eaten.
This was the beginning of a change in how I document travel that has made the trips better, the records more useful, and the sketchbooks significantly more interesting to come back to.
I stopped photographing most things and started drawing the ones that mattered.
Section 1. The Photography Problem
The camera is too fast.
You see something, you photograph it, and the photograph becomes the record of having seen it. Except the photograph did not require you to understand what you were looking at. It required you to point and press. The understanding is optional and usually skipped.
I have photographs of buildings I cannot remember visiting. The photograph proves I was there. It does not contain anything I learned about the place by being there.
A drawing requires the opposite relationship. To draw something you must look at it for long enough to understand its structure. Where the weight sits. How the parts relate. What is doing the work and what is decoration. You cannot skip this. The drawing fails if you do.
By the time you have drawn something you know it differently than if you had photographed it. The knowledge is slower and harder to produce and it stays.
Section 2. Why Chairs Specifically
I started drawing chairs for a practical reason.
They are the right size and complexity for a fifteen-to-twenty minute sketch, which is the amount of time I can reliably find at a café or a restaurant or waiting for a delayed train. They have enough structural logic to be interesting without requiring so much detail that you spend an hour on a single drawing.
A chair also tells you things about the place that nothing else does.
A café in Vienna uses chairs with arms and curved backs in dark bentwood. A café in Paris uses the small rattan bistro chair that points outward at the street. A bar in Seville uses plastic chairs and does not apologize for it because the bar does not need to apologize for anything.
The chair is a decision someone made about who is going to sit here and how long they are going to stay. A heavy chair invites you to settle. A light chair suggests you are welcome but not indefinitely. A chair without cushioning in a place that could have afforded cushioning is making a statement about the relationship between comfort and character.
You notice this with a pencil in a way you do not with a camera.
Section 3. What the Sketchbook Does for Memory
A photograph documents. A sketchbook activates.
When I open a sketchbook from a trip I can return to the specific conditions of the drawing. The light was from the left, low, which is why the shadows go the way they do. I was sitting outside and there was wind, which is why the line quality on the left pages is slightly rougher. I drew this corner of the market for twenty minutes and in that time a woman passed three times with the same bag and I think she was doing inventory of the stalls.
None of this is in the drawing exactly. All of it is retrievable from the drawing.
A photograph from the same trip shows me what was there. The sketchbook shows me what I was paying attention to.
These are different archives. The sketchbook is the more useful one for writing, for remembering, and for understanding what the trip actually was once the surface impressions have faded.
Section 4. The Practical Part
You do not need to be able to draw to do this.
The quality of the drawing is not the point. The looking is the point, and the looking happens regardless of whether the drawing is accurate or beautiful or something you would show another person.
Start with objects rather than buildings or streetscapes. Chairs are good. Table settings are good. The corner of a room. The pattern on a floor. Anything with a defined structure that you can observe fully from a fixed position in fifteen minutes.
Carry a small sketchbook — A6 or smaller — and a single pen. Not a full kit. The size of the equipment determines the commitment level and a small book with one pen has a commitment level of approximately zero, which means you will actually use it.
Photograph the things you need to photograph. The specific window detail you want to reference later. The street sign for navigation. The menu when it is handwritten and faded.
Leave the pasta alone. Eat it instead.
The Takeaway
The best travel record I have is not digital.
It is a series of sketchbooks that are ugly in places and accurate in none and contain more of what those trips actually were than ten thousand photographs would.
You do not need to draw well. You need to look long enough to see the thing.
The chair at the table across from yours is more interesting than you think.
Draw it and find out.