In the early 1980s, photographer Roger Minick captured a cross-section of tourists across the United States in his “Sightseer” series, a project he picked up again in the late 1990s and 2000. The determined sightseers’ fashion choices, delicious throwbacks for today’s viewer, were a big part of what drew Minick to his subjects.
“I’d be at a great distance at an overlook, and I’d see a couple arrive, get out of their car. And before I saw them or their faces, I would see what they were wearing, their colors, and I would be drawn to them for that reason,” Minick told CNN.
Those colors were missing the first time he set out to document tourists crisscrossing the American West to soak up the country’s vast national parks and wide-open landscapes.
In 1979, he shot in black and white. That was a mistake “because the colors are so interesting, the juxtaposition of what people wear and the backgrounds.” So the next year he retraced his steps, this time in color… read more >
