So an image of a homeless guy in New York is street but an image of a homeless guy in Mumbai is travel atmospherics. Maybe a Mumbai resident would think the image of the homeless guy in New York is travel atmospherics.
No. Travel atmospherics are
positive representations: the term stems from its original use in the photostock business, where a particular photographic requirement was early recognized, that being images that shed a positive, interesting and alluring light on a destination, and that inspire people from outwith that area to come visit. Homeless is not a draw. The objective of those atmospherics was to sell travel.
The problem of eventual image overload, as described earlier, is that everybody with some skill is drawn to the same "interesting" locations and to produce the same generic images. Even more than Indian culture is the ubiquity of the desert island image, the blue sky, the white/golden/pink beach with the single palm tree swooping low over that sand with a hammock attached. If your budget allowed, you had a pretty blonde in that hammock, peferrably sipping a colourful cocktail that some invisible, out-of-shot bar had provided. The Tony Stone specialty, if memory serves, was to have that blue sky with a single white cloud.
Even in goode olde Scotland, travel atmospherics were big busines
for local Scottish photographers.In all my years there I saw Loch Lomond twice in beautiful summery light; every other trip that water looked black, the sky grey, yet each year there were dozens of calendars being sent abroad to the Scottish diaspora showing the place all sunny, with flowers blossoming on the banks. All I ever saw on the banks were twigs and dead, blackened branches. Oh - and a couple of times, one of my models.
Travel atmospherics used to be very good business, as did Slobodan's cityscapes. It's his misfortune that he was born too late to make the best financial return on that skill that he has; all the big picture agencies had pages after pages of city. Why? Because they fulfilled not only travel promotion needs but business motivational image needs, too. Today, they go for cents to the photographer. What a waste.