Sightseer

Hello! Apologies for my absence, with work and my mother visiting from Johannesburg time to blog was scarce. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to a series by photographer Roger Minick titled Sightseer, which started in 1975 and ended in the late nineties. As the name suggests, the series is a collection of medium format portraits of American tourists in major tourist destinations throughout the country.

“I began to see the visitors as having a specific humanity, their own classification, a genus––Sightseer Americanus, if you will.  Previously in my photographic career, when my projects took me into the landscape, I had tended to look on sightseers with disdain, and certainly had never considered them a “subject” I would want to photograph seriously.  Yet over the course of those days I began to feel I was witnessing something uniquely American, something that I suddenly very much wanted to photograph.”