Janine Coyne's photographic essay, Sicilian Journey, documents life in Sicily today. Coyne's viewpoint presents a unique combination a unique combination of straight reportage and art photography. Recent trips to reportage and art photography. Recent trips to Sicily inspired the black and white gelatin-silver prints on view at the Italian American Museum from March 8 through April 7, 2006. Relevant to the Italian American Museum's focus, this body of work was initiated by Janine Coyne's desire to connect to her Sicilian heritage. Travel themes throughout the history of photography have remained constant. The attempt for personal growth, as documented by the lens presents the adventurer with a moment-by-moment account of distant places.

Before the invention of photography, this was not possible. But as early as the 1839, with the invention of the daguerreotype, a French publisher named Lerebours, commissioned images of such far away places as Russia, America and the Middle East. This series was published in the early 1840s and included over one hundred travel photographs. The theme quickly spread and many such commissioned projects were supported by private and public sources. Some include the dramatic views of the Alps made in the 1850s and 60s by Aimé Civiale, Louis and Auguste Bisson and others. In the United States, Edward Muybridge, Timothy O'Sullivan, A.J. Russell, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson portrayed the west in the 1860s and 70s. Edward S. Curtis continued this tradition and published The North American Indian, with twenty volumes of photographs taken between 1907 and 1937; it included a forward by President Theodore Roosevelt.

In the recent past, Walker Evans reported what he saw in the 1930s of everyday America in his book American Photographs (1938). Evans' purpose was to search for personal identity inspired by European writers who whet his visual appetite. In the 1920s, Edward Weston produced views of Mexico, while Paul Strand photographed France, Italy, Egypt, Ghana and Morocco. Similarly, Henry Cartier-Bresson's spontaneity directed his travel photographs.