16 April 2015 // Sanne Schrijver //Amersfoort

//WEEKLY S A N N E

Taking pictures is the number one thing people do when they do sightseeing.

From the early 80s to 2000 Roger Minick took documenting photographs from sightseers around the United States. He noticed crowd and campers increased in size, cell phones and cameras became current and more senior citizen and foreign tourists popped up within these 20 years of documenting.

“Sightseer” is Minick’s nostalgic, cultural and always humorous series. Humor is characteristic to the series because the sightseeing experience, particularly in the United States, are crazy, wild activities.

Minick started the project at first with black-and-white photography but quickly switched to color because the irony and humor between the tourists’ outfit and the landscape or background needed a color palette to make the story stronger.

Getting people to pose was very easy for Minick. He was often asked to take pictures of people because he was equipped like a professional photographer. He often took the opportunity to take a photograph from a group who posed themselves in front of his camera. Or he just simply took a picture of the people photographing themselves, unaware of Minick’s presence.

The idea of the snapshot was always in the back of his mind. Minick creates raw honestly and amazed straightness by using a fill flash.

The image “Couple in Matching Shirts” is my favorite. For me it’s a typical, recognizable image for Holiday moments, tourists hotspots or sightseers. The story behind the image is very funny: On a rainy day at Crater Lake National Park Roger Minick wanted to document a couple in matching shirts. Luck came his way because the sky brighten, a car pulled up and out popped the couple in matching shirts. Minick approached the couple and told them he loved their shirts. He just said the right thing, the woman told him she had just made the shirts and was very proud of them, and this was their first time wearing them outside. A picture was born.