Rachel Turney has traveled the world with curiosity and a camera. It all began in childhood.
“I started taking pictures of houses in my Midwest neighborhood when I was in grade school. I was very interested in architecture. Patterns have always intrigued me. Shutters on brick, the placement of windows, the varying colors of paint.
“I also spent a lot of time as a child with stacks of National Geographics at my grandparents’ house. My grandparents were big travelers and I loved to look at their photographs and old slide shows. I think the National Geographics strongly influenced my passion and interest in travel photography.
“As a teenager, I was especially interested in the art of Frida Kahlo. While not a photographer, there are a lot of intriguing photos of her that I would hang up in my room.”
Turney has been traveling, and at some points living internationally, since she was seventeen. Her father was a Fulbright Scholar and he and his family of six were sent to Szeged, Hungary. “As a teenager,” she recalls, “a small town in Hungary felt pretty remote and isolating. I was lucky, because I was able to make friends easily and had a lot of freedom in Europe. That experience abroad definitely gave me my wanderlust and more importantly taught me that I could rely on my intuition and abilities to explore the world.”
Since then, Turney has traveled solo to over fifty countries, from South Africa, Jordan, and Indonesia to Brazil, China and Turkey.
She taught English abroad and later received her EdD in Curriculum and Instruction in 2017 from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She was an Assistant Professor of Education at William Woods University in Fulton, Missouri and worked as an adjunct at Fontbonne University, Stephens College, and Webster University.
Turney supplemented her teaching salary with various hospitality jobs—everything from washing dishes and waitressing to hosting—until Covid started. She currently works as a remote student teacher supervisor for Western Governors University and an online teacher for the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
“In Snow Queen, above, my friend Lena and I had just toured the barrel aging process at Goose Island Brewery in Chicago. We came out to a blanket of unexpected snow. Lena was joyous in the snow.”
“I took the photograph Three the week I met Zach Stewart in May of 2021,” she remembers. “I had come to Roatan, Honduras to escape doom scrolling and monotony. Zach had come there to visit his friend, Jean-Noel, the owner of Seaside Inn where I was staying. Zach and I were the only two guests at the inn (Roatan was still closed to cruise ship traffic and only fully vaccinated people were allowed to fly in). We met on a Friday and by Sunday I think we were truly in love. This photo is of our three empty pina colada glasses down on West Bay Beach. This photograph has become a representation of the start of an amazing love adventure. We ended up quitting our jobs, selling our houses and traveling for a year until June of 2022.” Rachel and Zach married at Seaside Inn in January 2022.
After finding her life travel partner, Turney and Zach ventured to Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka. She says the most interesting destinations were Tasmania and Kenya.
Traveling with her husband has also given Turney a ready model. “Having my own model with me at all times has greatly influenced my aesthetic. We are very lucky to be at the point in our careers where we can work remotely. My husband works in payments processing.
“I used to take landscapes and still lifes until I met Zach. I just think he is so pretty, I want to take his picture all the time! Every picture I take is just in the moment. I usually ask Zach to stop and freeze so that I can capture the way I see him, right then.”
“For example, I took the photograph,Yoga, of Zach in our home on a yoga mat and he’s wearing a t-shirt he bought at the grocery store.
“In Monesteroli, Italy, 2023, top, Zach and I spent a month in Italy in the summer of 2023. That had always been a dream of mine, pasta and wine in Tuscany. The picture captures us cooling down after hiking in Monesteroli through cliffside small villages which are only accessible by foot,” she says.
“Fuji Morning and Fuji Sunrise, above and below, are part of Turney’s collection taken from a traditional stilt house (funaya) in Japan.”We stayed in the area around Fuji for four days, and we were lucky that Fuji-san graced us as the mountain was in the clouds much of the time,” she says.
Turney has no formal art training and uses her Google phone to photograph. She only alters her photographs by adding filters: Palma for her color images and Vista or Eiffel for her black and whites.
“I use black and white when I want to focus on one subject or idea. I feel this eliminates distractions. To me black and white photography tells viewers they are looking at the past, at a memory.
It’s the love of travel, Turney says, that has led to all her current collections. “When I started it was in the era of no smart phones, so it was quite the adventure. I’ve prioritized travel since then.
“I want to expand the idea of daily life and show that there is art in everything,” she adds. “Life is art – anyone can take a picture on their phone. I’m capturing a moment that I really loved. My work is all about focusing on a point in time and making memories. That’s essentially what photography is all about, capturing a memory.
“I also want to take some of the mystery out of travel. You might not want to spend time in a Jeep in the wilderness with a cheetah on your car and beetles in your bed, nor sleep on a mat on a floor in Japan, but how about a beer in Germany? I think travel is the eraser of ignorance. We are but a tiny dot in the cosmos, and travel has helped me see how small we are compared to the rest of humanity and life on Earth.”
Share this post with your friends.
