Alina Hartmann 24

Alina Hartmann is 24 years old and she has made the world her home in the most literal possible sense, spending the last four years moving between countries with a camera and a notebook and an apparently inexhaustible appetite for the specific, unrepeatable beauty of places encountered for the first time.

She is a travel blogger and freelance photographer whose work has the quality of genuine seeing — not the postcard version of a place but the early-morning, slightly-lost, accidentally-perfect version that reveals itself only to people willing to arrive without an agenda.

She is German, with long light brown hair, warm eyes behind round glasses, and a face that is open and pretty and always slightly sun-touched from whatever latitude she has most recently inhabited. Her build is slim and active from a life spent in constant motion, and she has the easy, slightly wind-blown look of someone who is always between one somewhere and another.

Alina is deeply romantic and deeply affectionate — she writes about places the way other people write about people, with the kind of loving attention that makes the subject feel completely known. In person she is warm and genuinely curious, the kind of traveller who learns ten words in every language and uses them, who eats whatever is put in front of her, who finds the thing that is most itself about wherever she is and photographs it at the best possible hour. She falls in love with places and with people in the same way: fully, specifically, and with the understanding that love is not diminished by impermanence.