Here’s something nobody really talks about: the best photography education Anthony Schiliro ever got didn’t come from a camera manual or a workshop or studying f-stops in a YouTube tutorial. It came from books. Specifically, the kind of books that have nothing to do with photography at all. Literature. Fiction. Philosophy dressed up as a novel. The kind of writing that rewires something in the way you pay attention to the world around you. Which is, at the end of the day, the only skill that actually matters behind a lens.
These seven books aren’t recommendations in the casual sense. They’re the ones that genuinely changed how he frames a shot, chooses a subject, or decides that something ordinary is worth stopping for.
1. The Stranger by Albert Camus
Start here. Camus wrote Meursault as a man who notices everything and feels… adjacent to it. Detached but intensely observant. There’s a lesson buried in that detachment — not emotional coldness, but a particular quality of attention that doesn’t impose meaning on what it sees before it’s looked properly. Travel photographers do this constantly, by the way. They arrive somewhere with a story already written and then just illustrate it. Camus is an antidote to that. Read this before any trip and you’ll find yourself looking at things a beat longer before deciding what they mean.
2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut’s masterpiece is, among other things, a book about time — specifically about how non-linear experience actually is, how a single moment can collapse into another with no warning whatsoever. So it goes. That idea has practical implications for travel photography. The best images tend to hold multiple layers of time simultaneously: a crumbling wall with fresh laundry hung across it, an old man checking a smartphone outside a medieval church. Vonnegut trained Anthony to look for those collisions. You start seeing them everywhere once you know what you’re looking for.
3. 1984 by George Orwell
Less obvious than it sounds. Yes, it’s dystopian fiction, but what Orwell actually wrote was an extraordinarily precise study of how power shapes physical space — architecture, signage, the way people move through controlled environments versus open ones. For a photographer working in cities across multiple continents, that lens is invaluable. You start reading streets differently. You notice what’s been removed, what’s been emphasized, who gets to occupy which kinds of space. 1984 taught Anthony to look at a city’s bones, not just its face.
4. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Plath’s prose does something technically remarkable: it renders interiority as physical sensation. The world in The Bell Jar has weight, texture, temperature. Reading it recalibrates your attention toward sensory detail in a way that’s almost impossible to explain but completely obvious once you’ve experienced it. Anthony carries this into his photography as a kind of question: what does this place actually feel like to stand inside? Not look at — feel. That distinction separates a technically competent travel photograph from one that actually transports someone.
5. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Short. Brutal. Strange. And oddly instructive about perspective — literally. Kafka forces you to inhabit a vantage point that isn’t yours and find it, against all reasonable expectation, completely coherent from the inside. Travel photography at its best does the same thing. You’re not documenting a place from outside it; you’re trying to render how it feels to actually live there. Kafka is ruthless practice for that kind of imaginative displacement. Also, it’s barely 70 pages. No excuse not to read it.
6. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Okay, this one requires some commitment. But what Melville built in Moby-Dick is essentially a masterclass in the relationship between obsession and attention — how caring deeply about a single thing changes the quality of everything you notice around it. Ishmael doesn’t just see the ocean. He sees it with the full weight of everything it means to him, which is what makes those descriptions feel so alive even 170-odd years later. Anthony’s travel photography works the same way. The places that photograph best for him are the ones he actually cared about before he got there.
7. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Two Orwell entries — probably justified. Where 1984 teaches you to read power in space, this early memoir teaches you to look at the people power overlooks entirely. Orwell spent months deliberately invisible in both cities, moving through the parts of Paris and London that don’t appear in any guidebook, and what he documented was the extraordinary texture of ordinary, difficult life. For travel photographers, it’s a reminder that the most compelling subjects are almost never the famous ones. They’re the ones nobody else thought to stop and look at.
About Anthony Schiliro
Anthony Schiliro is a travel photographer who’s spent the better part of the last decade dragging a camera through five continents, collecting images, and a pretty serious reading habit along the way. His work sits somewhere between street photography and philosophy — not in a pretentious way, just in the sense that he tends to ask “why does this matter?” before he ever asks “does this look good?” Sicily got him started. Vietnam slowed him down. The rest of the world has been filling in the gaps ever since. When he’s not traveling, he’s probably in the middle of a Kafka novel or logging miles on a rowing machine. Sometimes both, which seems dangerous.
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