Gary,
Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel is a book about why people travel: to escape their rut, or the city, for the exotic, the sublime, or the merely mundane, curiosity or just because everyone else has.

He also addresses photography as he says that in travelling we are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs.Travelling with a camera makes you more receptive to your surrounds since you view each and every laneway, street, or play of light across a building is a potential picture.

yeah,
de Botton says that we do not travel well as we are sadly ignorant of the art of travel. The travel industry is quick to tell us where to go but not how and why.

So with the aid of a team of dead painters and poets, aesthetes and Romantics, de Botton explores this very modern malaise.

Thus from Edward Hopper we can learn the poetry of train journeys and gas stations and half-empty cafés. From Flaubert's horror of home and his yearning for the East, we can understand more of the traveller's motive.
Painters can help us to see when we travel: Van Gogh to see cypress trees and Provence, Ruskin to see everything if we do as he says and take the time to sit and draw, even if we're not very good.

At the end of his own course in travel, de Botton tests out his newly acquired skills with a walk in Hammersmith. He finds himself noticing all sorts of things afresh: people in the street, people in restaurants, buildings.

It's a self therapy book in the philosophical sense.