The Expat Eye: Finding Everyday Beauty in the Places We Call Home
Years of expat life in Dubai and Denmark taught us to look past the grand skyline and find the real sense of place in quiet, everyday moments.
When you live somewhere new, the first thing you photograph is usually the biggest thing on the skyline. It’s a sort of proof of life, an “I am here” message sent via a landmark. We’ve certainly done it. For a couple of years, one of us was based in Dubai, and the view from the apartment balcony was a constant, shimmering wall of glass and steel.
Day or night, it was hard to ignore. You’d grab the camera and take another shot of the Burj Khalifa, another one of the sunset hitting the high-rises. They’re good photos, technically. The light hits just right, the composition is all there. But after a while, you realise you’re just documenting the view, not the place. It's a skyline that fills the frame, but it could be the view from any hotel room.
The shift happens slowly. You stop being a tourist and start being a resident. You find your local coffee shop, the quietest route to the supermarket, the park bench with the best shade. Your camera starts coming out for different reasons. It’s not about capturing the grand statement anymore; it’s about the small details that make a place feel like yours.
Finding the Local's View
We spent a couple of years in Esbjerg, Denmark, and it couldn’t be more different from Dubai. It’s a working port town on the North Sea coast. The most impressive things on the skyline are wind turbines and the odd lighthouse. There’s no balcony view that will stop traffic.
Instead, the pictures we have from there are quieter. One of our favourite spots was down at the harbour at dusk. A few locals would always be there, fishing or just watching the sun go down behind the island of Fanø. It’s not a landmark, and you won’t find it on a postcard. But for us, that simple, repeated ritual says more about the sense of place in Esbjerg than any wide-angle vista ever could. It’s a photo of a habit, of a local rhythm.
Seeing Home with New Eyes
The funny thing is, this way of seeing follows you home. After spending so much time abroad, looking for the small things that define a new place, you start to apply the same eye to the places you thought you knew inside out.
Living and working away meant we’d missed a lot of the simple stuff back in the UK. We’d never really explored the woodlands just a short drive away. We were always focused on the next big trip. But coming back, we started taking those local walks. We found this little man-made waterfall in Plas Power Woods near Wrexham, part of an old industrial works. A decade ago, we probably would have walked right past it, looking for a bigger, more dramatic landscape. Now, it feels like a discovery.
That’s what years of moving around has done for our photography. It trained us to look for the everyday extraordinary. It’s a perspective we try to bring to all of our photographs now, whether we’re living somewhere for years or just passing through for a day. You learn that the real story of a place is rarely the view from the balcony.