Katie Goes Everywhere I Don’t

There’s a specific pleasure in following someone who lives the life you keep meaning to live. Katie Kuiper is a fashion student and travel blogger from Sydney—Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, the long flight for no reason except that somewhere else is always interesting. Meanwhile I’m on my couch. We’ve each made our choices and I respect the arrangement.

Photographer Tom Batrouney shot her in an Australian garden—natural light, unhurried, the kind of session that doesn’t announce itself. She moved through the frame the way people do when they’re used to being photographed and have stopped performing for the camera. The results are easy and good. The garden looks like somewhere worth being in. She looks like a person worth following wherever she ends up next.

I don’t romanticize the travel-content life the way I used to. The constant documentation of your own experience instead of just having it sounds exhausting now in a way it didn’t at twenty-two. But Katie’s Instagram doesn’t feel like labor—it feels like someone who actually wants to be in motion, which is rarer than the genre suggests. That’s the version worth watching. From here. With pizza. I stand by that as a life strategy.