Travel Photographer Interviews: Cameron Karsten on Authentic Storytelling

📸 The Moment That Changed Everything

I stood barefoot in the mud of a Zapotec village outside San Juan Guelavía, rain cooling my neck, camera strap slick with humidity—and realized I’d spent three days photographing people without ever asking their names. My lens was sharp, my composition tight, but the images felt hollow. Then Cameron Karsten handed me his weathered Leica M6—not to shoot, but to hold. ‘Look through it,’ he said, voice low over the drumming rain. ‘Then look away. What did you see first? Not what’s in focus—but who looked back.’ That question didn’t just shift my framing. It rewired how I travel. Travel photographer interviews like those Cameron Karsten conducts aren’t about extracting stories—they’re about reciprocity, timing, and deep listening before the shutter clicks. If you’re planning to document people while traveling, start here: build trust before you build a portfolio.

🌍 The Setup: Why Oaxaca, Why Then

It wasn’t ambition that brought me to Oaxaca—it was exhaustion. After two years documenting street life across Southeast Asia, my work had flattened into predictable patterns: markets at dawn, artisans mid-task, children laughing beside crumbling walls. I’d begun mistaking volume for depth. My archive held 12,000 images—but fewer than fifty carried emotional weight I could trace back to a real conversation.

I chose Oaxaca not for its photogenic churches or mole negro, but because it’s where Cameron Karsten spent six months in 2022 living with weavers in Teotitlán del Valle, returning annually to re-photograph families across generational shifts. His long-form project Threads of Memory had quietly influenced curators at Fototeca de San Luis Potosí and appeared in British Journal of Photography’s 2023 ethical practice dossier1. I emailed him on impulse—no pitch, no portfolio link—just: ‘I think I’ve forgotten how to see people. Can I shadow you for a week?’ He replied three days later: ‘Come. But bring notebooks, not memory cards.’

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Camera Stopped Working

We met at Mercado 20 de Noviembre, under a sagging awning strung with dried chiles. Cameron wore canvas trousers, a faded chambray shirt, and no visible gear beyond a leather satchel. No DSLR slung across his chest, no tripod strapped to his backpack. Just two film cameras—one loaded, one empty—and a small Moleskine bound in recycled wool.

Our first assignment: photograph nothing. For four hours, we walked the market’s narrow aisles, stopping only when someone caught our eye—not to raise a lens, but to ask permission to sit. Cameron bought tamales from Doña Lupe, shared them, asked about her daughter’s apprenticeship in natural dyeing, and listened for seven minutes without taking notes. When he finally opened his notebook, he wrote only: ‘She hums when she grinds cochineal. Her left thumb has three calluses—two from the metate, one from holding thread.’

That afternoon, I tried to replicate it. I approached a young woman selling embroidered blouses. She smiled politely. I gestured to my camera. She nodded—quick, practiced, distant. I shot three frames. Later, reviewing them, I saw her eyes were unfocused, her posture closed. Not because she disliked me—but because I hadn’t earned her attention. The conflict wasn’t technical. It was relational. My gear worked fine. My intention didn’t.

🤝 The Discovery: What Interviewing Really Means

Cameron doesn’t conduct ‘interviews’ in the journalistic sense. He practices what he calls slow portraiture: a layered process where image-making is secondary to relationship-building. Over the next five days, I watched him move through three distinct phases—with each person, each family, each community:

• 💡 Phase One: Presence Without Purpose — Sitting silently for 20–45 minutes, accepting coffee or aguas frescas, observing routines, noticing rhythms (when chickens returned to roost, when radios switched from news to ranchera music).
• 📝 Phase Two: Narrative Anchors — Asking open, non-invasive questions: ‘What’s the first thing you do when you wake?’ ‘Who taught you this stitch?’ ‘What’s something you wish more visitors understood about this place?’ He recorded answers only in shorthand, never audio.
• 📸 Phase Three: Co-Creation — Offering subjects full control: choice of location, time of day, clothing, even whether to be photographed at all. One elder in San Miguel Tilquiapam declined twice—then asked Cameron to photograph his hands holding his late wife’s spindle. The resulting image ran in Aperture’s 2023 ‘Care’ issue2.

The most unexpected moment came in San Juan Guelavía. We’d been invited to a family’s courtyard for lunch after helping harvest squash blossoms. As rain began, the grandmother, Rufina, pulled out a handwoven huipil covered in geometric motifs. She didn’t speak Spanish—only Zapotec—but pointed to one pattern: three interlocking diamonds. Cameron translated softly: ‘This is not decoration. It’s the path between our village, the mountain spring, and the cornfield. You walk it every day. So do your ancestors.’ She placed the cloth over my shoulders. I didn’t lift my camera. I held her gaze and nodded. That silence lasted forty-seven seconds. It remains the most articulate photograph I’ve ever taken—even though no image exists.

🌄 The Journey Continues: Beyond the Frame

Cameron’s work isn’t archived in galleries alone. Each portrait series includes a physical copy delivered to the subject—a 12×16-inch print, mounted on recycled wood, with handwritten captions in both Spanish and Zapotec. He partners with local teachers to co-develop bilingual photography workshops for teens, using donated digital cameras and analog kits. In 2023, twelve students from five villages exhibited at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca—showing portraits of elders alongside oral histories transcribed on handmade paper.

What surprised me wasn’t the ethics—it was the practicality. Cameron budgets 30% of his grant funding for print materials and community honoraria (not ‘model releases’). He uses Ilford HP5 pushed to ISO 1600 for low-light interiors—because it renders skin tones evenly without flash, and labs in Oaxaca City develop it reliably within 48 hours. He avoids Wi-Fi-dependent backups; instead, he scans negatives weekly at Fotolab Oaxaca (fotolaboaxaca.com) and stores encrypted copies on offline drives kept in a local library’s climate-controlled archive.

When I asked how he handles language barriers, he showed me his Zapotec phrasebook—not the tourist version, but a collaboratively edited PDF compiled with linguists from the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca. It includes pronunciation guides, contextual usage notes (e.g., ‘Tanu kundaa means “I’m learning”—use before asking about craft techniques, never before requesting a portrait’), and warnings about regional dialect shifts between valleys.

⭐ Reflection: What This Taught Me About Travel—and Myself

I used to believe travel photography succeeded when viewers paused. Now I know it succeeds when subjects feel seen—not as motifs, but as collaborators whose agency shapes the final frame. Cameron doesn’t ‘capture moments.’ He witnesses transitions: the shift from guardedness to ease, from performance to presence, from ‘visitor’ to ‘known person.’

This required dismantling my own assumptions. I’d assumed fluency in Spanish meant access. It doesn’t—especially when speaking with elders whose primary language is Zapotec or Mixe. I’d assumed offering payment was respectful. Cameron explained it’s often read as transactional erasure—replacing relationship with receipt. Instead, he brings materials: quality thread for weavers, archival ink for scribes, or native seed packets for farmers. Gifts that extend practice, not conclude it.

Most fundamentally, I learned that time isn’t a resource to optimize—it’s the medium itself. The ‘best light’ isn’t golden hour. It’s the hour after someone stops checking their phone, starts telling stories, and forgets you’re holding a camera. That light doesn’t require a filter. It requires patience you can’t rush, and humility you can’t fake.

📝 Practical Takeaways: Woven Into the Journey

None of this is theoretical. These are decisions made daily, adjusted seasonally, negotiated locally:

• 🗺️ Research beyond tourism sites: Before arriving, I mapped community radio stations (like XEGLO ‘La Voz de los Pueblos’), local cooperatives (e.g., Cooperativa Artesanal Teotitlán), and municipal cultural offices. Their newsletters listed upcoming festivals, weaving demonstrations, and open studio days—far more reliable than generic ‘events calendars’.
• 🚌 Transport shapes access: Buses to Teotitlán run hourly until 6 p.m.; after that, shared taxis cost ~80 MXN but require negotiation in Zapotec or via a trusted fixer. Cameron always confirms return times with drivers beforehand—and carries small bills in denominations locals accept (no 500-peso notes in rural zones).
• ☕ Shared meals > staged portraits: Eating together builds implicit consent. In San Juan Guelavía, sharing atole with a family meant I could later photograph their pottery workshop—not because they ‘allowed’ it, but because refusing would have broken hospitality norms.
• 🌅 Film choice affects trust: Digital cameras signal immediacy—and expectation of instant review. Cameron uses film partly because developing takes time, removing pressure to ‘approve’ images on the spot. Locals told me they feel less scrutinized when the camera doesn’t beep or display previews.

None of these strategies guarantee access. They simply reduce friction—making space for something quieter, slower, and far more durable than a single image.

🌙 Conclusion: The Lens Is the Last Tool You Reach For

I left Oaxaca with twelve exposed rolls of black-and-white film—and zero digital files. Cameron developed them himself in a borrowed darkroom behind a carpentry workshop in Tlacolula. When I saw the contact sheets weeks later, I recognized none of the ‘hero shots’ I’d imagined. Instead: a child’s fingers threading wool, a wrinkled hand adjusting a loom shuttle, rain streaking across a window where two women sat shoulder-to-shoulder, silent, peeling chiles. No faces fully frontal. No forced smiles. Just continuity—of gesture, of labor, of quiet endurance.

This trip didn’t make me a better photographer. It made me a more careful witness. And that, Cameron reminded me over our last cup of café de olla, is the prerequisite for anything worth preserving: “You don’t need to document the world. You need to understand your place inside it—then let the rest follow.”