Have camera, will travel

Three of those trips -- Weston's, Cartier-Bresson's, and Frank's -- figure in "Far from Home: Photography, Travel, and Inspiration," which runs at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 6. Also in the show is work from Evans (Cuba), Irving Penn and Aaron Siskind (Peru), Joel Meyerowitz and Harry Callahan (France), Joel Sternfeld (Italy), and Linda Connor (India). All the pictures are from the Art Institute's permanent collection. It's an impressive show of curatorial force.

A crucial distinction hinges on that final word in the show's title, "inspiration." Cartier-Bresson, for example, traveled pretty much everywhere during his astonishing career. Usually, though, it was on assignment. The trip to Spain, which came when he was just starting out and which did so much to form his aesthetic, was on his own nickel. Traveling to get inspiration is very different from traveling to gather documentation. Travel photography is primarily about where : particular places. Journalistic assignments are primarily about what : events or people at a particular time in particular places.

In the end, of course, it's the artist's vision that matters most. Photographers photograph what they see, and they see what interests them -- and ignore what doesn't. Penn's Peru is all about people, Siskind's all about walls. There's nary an Ande to be seen. Those choices reflect the thrust of each man's work: Penn the superlative portraitist, Siskind the master abstractionist of structural exteriors. As the latter wrote in 1973: "You are making the pictures only partly in terms of the places you're in . . . You're making pictures that are a continuation of the kind of picture you were making before."

The Peru Siskinds -- gnarly, blunt, high-contrast, fiercely direct -- are like Siskinds from New York or Chicago. Every wall he shoots, regardless of locale, is so particular as to become, through his camera's intervention, effectively universal.