The Travel & locaTion Issue
Traveling
how three top travel photographers
refined their photographic styles to
create images that communicate more
than just the beauty of a location.
in style
Ditte isager: traveling Light
When your year fluctuates between summers of 17-hour days and winters in which
darkness stretches on for just as long, it’s easy to understand how light might mean
something different to you than to people living in other parts of the world. For
Danish-born photographer Ditte Isager, this uncommon relationship to light, which
was ingrained in her during her upbringing in Copenhagen, is essential to her style
as a photographer.
“My biggest inspiration is probably light, the way daylight works,” says Isager,
who shoots assignments for clients like Departures, Harper’s Bazaar and GQ.
Whether she’s trying to capture the light as she sees it in a given place, or to recreate
how the light looked somewhere she recently visited, Isager relies on both technical
and creative abilities to deliver what she describes as her “simple Nordic” style. “I
think that’s the fascinating thing about photography,” Isager says. “You can create
a moody day on a sunny day or you can make a moody day feel like a spring day.”
In her work, which can range from clean and simple to dark and compositionally
complex, Isager is interested in “how to create light and how to make contrast in the
light, but also in the objects, in the texture, in everything,” she says.
