There is a curious ritual that happens towards the end of almost every journey.
We start looking for something to bring home.
Sometimes it is deliberate. We buy a postcard, a print, a ceramic bowl or something made locally. Sometimes it is almost accidental: a ticket we cannot quite bring ourselves to throw away, a shell found on a beach, a restaurant card slipped into a pocket.
And of course there are the photographs. Hundreds of them, in some cases thousands.
We already know we were there. We do not really need proof. So why do we keep collecting pieces of places?
The answer may have less to do with the object itself than with what happens to our memories once the journey is over.
A place is never just a place
Psychologists and researchers in environmental psychology use the term place attachment to describe the emotional bonds we develop with particular places.
Those bonds can become surprisingly personal. A city that means nothing to one person can represent an entire chapter of somebody else's life. A beach can be where you spent every childhood summer. A street in New York can be where you met someone. A village in Italy can somehow contain the memory of a particular week when everything felt right.
Research increasingly connects this attachment to autobiographical memory: the memories through which we construct the story of our own lives.
A 2024 paper examining the relationship between place and autobiographical memory describes how places can help us revisit a past version of ourselves. Other research has shown that memories associated with places are linked to place identity and emotional attachment.
In other words, we do not simply remember places.
We remember ourselves in them.
The photograph is not the memory
This perhaps explains something familiar about looking through old travel photographs.
You see a picture of a café. Objectively, there is not much there: four chairs, a table, perhaps a striped awning.
But you do not really see four chairs.
You remember who was sitting opposite you. You remember what happened before you arrived there, the conversation you had, what you ordered, perhaps even the heat of the afternoon or the song that was playing.
The visible image is only the entrance.
There is research behind this phenomenon too. A study of travel photography found that photographs can stimulate autobiographical memories and that those memories are associated with positive emotions, attachment to a destination and even the desire to return.
This does not mean that every photograph makes us happy, of course. Memory is far more complicated than that. But it does suggest that an image of a place can act as a cue, opening access to something much larger than the information contained in the image itself.
Why we bring things back
The same idea helps explain the enduring existence of the souvenir.
Souvenirs are sometimes treated as the slightly embarrassing side of travel. Snow globes, magnets, miniature monuments, mugs and objects that seemed completely irresistible on holiday can look rather different once they reach the kitchen at home.
Yet researchers take souvenirs considerably more seriously than we might imagine.
A study published in the Journal of Travel Research identified memory as one of the important motivations for buying souvenirs. More recent research has looked at what happens to those objects after the holiday is over.
One particularly charming 2024 study investigated something as ordinary as the fridge magnet. Researchers found that because magnets remain visible within everyday domestic life, encounters with them can stimulate memories of holidays and generate emotional responses long after the trip itself has ended.
The humble fridge magnet, it turns out, may have been doing more psychological work than we gave it credit for.
From the fridge to the wall
That idea is particularly interesting to us because we spend our days making images of places.
When Alecse began creating travel posters, and later when Cha developed her own collections, the obvious subject was the destination itself. A beach, a building, a street, a swimming pool, a mountain, a particular view.
“I don’t think you can ever reduce a place to a single view. A place is made of hundreds of perspectives, details, moments and memories. As an artist, you can only choose one of them and say: this is the part I want to remember today.”
But years of watching people choose posters in our galleries has made something else increasingly apparent.
People rarely choose a place simply because it is beautiful.
They tell us why that place matters.
Someone looking through hundreds of images suddenly stops because we have a poster of the island where they spent their honeymoon. Someone else finds the town where their grandparents lived. A couple recognises a beach they return to every summer. A visitor discovers an image of somewhere they lived twenty years ago.
The artwork is the same for everyone who sees it.
What it contains is not.
An image you live with behaves differently
There is another distinction between a photograph stored on a phone and an image hanging on a wall.
One waits to be found. The other becomes part of everyday life.
We have an extraordinary number of photographs now. They travel with us in our phones and accumulate almost without limit. Yet most disappear into enormous digital libraries that we visit only occasionally.
An image on a wall has a different relationship with time. You encounter it without looking for it.
At breakfast. Walking through the hallway. Coming home from work. Ten years after the trip itself.
Research into favourite places suggests that autobiographical memories and emotional attachment can influence how we experience even an imagined place. A recent study published in 2026 goes further, finding across several experiments that recalling places to which people feel attached can increase their sense of meaning.
That does not prove that hanging a travel poster on your wall will make you happier. We would be very suspicious of anyone selling art with that promise.
But it does reinforce something much more modest and, perhaps, more interesting: places can carry meaning long after we have left them.
Perhaps that is what we are really bringing home
A good souvenir does not need to reproduce everything about a journey.
It cannot.
It only needs to open the door.
The blue of a swimming pool might be enough to bring back an entire summer. The silhouette of a mountain can recall the people who climbed it with you. A particular Barcelona street might take you immediately back to an evening that nobody else looking at the same image could possibly know about.
This is also why the value of a travel image is not necessarily proportional to the fame of its destination.
The Eiffel Tower might mean nothing to you. A tiny fishing village might mean everything.
At MyRetroPoster, our catalogue has gradually grown to more than 1,300 posters covering places across more than 130 countries. Seen purely as a catalogue, that is an enormous number of images.
But perhaps that is the wrong way to look at it.
They are 1,300 possible doors.
And when somebody stands in one of our galleries and suddenly says, “That's the one”, what they have recognised is often not simply a destination.
They have recognised a piece of their own story.
Maybe that is why we bring places home.
Further reading & research
This article draws on research into place attachment, autobiographical memory, travel photography and the role of souvenirs in remembering travel experiences.
- Place and Memory: Revisiting the Past Self Through Autobiographical Memory
- Research on travel photography, autobiographical memory and positive emotions
- Post holiday memory work: Everyday encounters with fridge magnets , Annals of Tourism Research, 2024.
- Sites of meaning making: Places of attachment afford psychological meaning , 2026.
