All the while, leisure travel itself was changing. The publishing house established by Karl Baedeker in Germany issued ‘‘The Rhine,’’ one of its first travel books in 1861. Not long after that came ‘‘Switzerland.’’ Informed about the best rails and trails, the most reliable hotels and information on local customs, an intrepid traveler could experience foreign lands without an entourage or local contacts. The Baedeker guides are tart and direct. Swiss hotels are praised: ‘‘Switzerland may be said to have a specialty for hotels; few better are to be met with in any part of the world.’’ Swiss wine is condemned: ‘‘Wine is generally a source of much vexation. The ordinary table wines are often so bad that refuge has to be taken in those of a more expensive class, which is indeed the very aim and object of the landlord.’’ But throughout Baedeker’s Switzerland, over the hundreds of pages, what impresses is the attention to detail, the almost microscopic precision with which each itinerary, town, museum, mountain range and hike is described.

Baedeker was already able to state, in that early guide to Switzerland, that places like the Rigi, the Brünig and the Scheideck were on ‘‘beaten tracks.’’ By the 1880s, Switzerland was estimated to be receiving a million visitors a year. Travelers tend to go where other travelers have gone, and perhaps this is part of the reason travel photography remains in thrall to the typical. When you do visit Zurich or Cape Town or Bangkok, they are very much alike: The amusement parks have striking similarities, the cafes all play the same Brazilian music, the malls are interchangeable, kids on the school buses resemble one another and the interiors of middle-class homes conform to the same parameters.

This doesn’t mean the world is uninteresting. It only means that the world is more uniform than most photo essays acknowledge, and that a lot of travel photography relies on an easy essentialism. I like Italo Calvino’s idea of ‘‘continuous cities,’’ as described in the novel ‘‘Invisible Cities.’’ He suggests that there is actually just one big, continuous city that does not begin or end: ‘‘Only the name of the airport changes.’’ What is then interesting is to find, in that continuity, the less-obvious differences of texture: the signs, the markings, the assemblages, the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape. This is what outstanding photographers are able to do, and it is the target the rest of us chase.

The question I confronted in Switzerland is similar to that confronted by any camera-toting visitor in a great landscape: Can my photograph convey an experience that others have already captured so well? The answer is almost always no, but you try anyway. I might feel myself to be a singular traveler, but I am in fact part of a great endless horde. In the 1870s, Mark Twain was already complaining: ‘‘Now everybody goes everywhere; and Switzerland, and many other regions which were unvisited and unknown remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days a buzzing hive of restless strangers.’’