Sightseer Americanus: A throwback to tourists past


<em>Couple at Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, 1980.</em> American photographer Roger Minick started shooting his Sightseer series of color photos in 1980 as sort of a tourist time capsule.


In the early 1980s, Minick captured a cross-section of American tourists 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," said Minick, 72, who's based in Danville, California.
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.

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