I was researching your profile and noticed you attended Berkeley in the 60s; that must’ve been a significant period in history to be a student there. I went there for graduate school. Best years of my life! Go Bears! :)

I loved Berkeley as well! Though they say that if you remember Berkeley, you weren't there. Anyway, it was a great time in my life. It was where I attended university, perfected my photographic skills, met my wife, and most importantly, it was where I became exposed to ideas about the world that have stayed with me to this day…

You have been taking photos for quite a long time. How did you get started? When did you decide you were going to be a photographer for the rest of your life?

Two events during High School, back in the early Sixties, turned me toward photography. One day I was sitting in the library when I happened upon a magazine with a spread of Ansel Adams landscapes. I remember being struck by the richness of the images and the boldness of the vision. A short time later my father gave me a copy of the book Family of Man –– a collection of photographs curated by Edward Steichen which were taken by photographers from all over the world, emphasizing the commonality and humanity of humankind. The book immediately made me realize I wanted to be a photographer. Soon I had a twin-lens Mamiya C2 and was teaching myself photography. Other than a brief summer class at a community college, I have had no formal training in photography.

How has traveling in the US changed in the age of social media?

Well, for one thing, cellphones did not exist back when I was working on the Sightseer project. If they had, I would have certainly incorporated selfies into the series. For me, the big change resulting from social media is how the interface between the cellphone camera and posting on Instagram or Facebook has broadened my awareness of the world and at the same time allowed immediate feedback on images I have taken. Also, the cellphone, with its GPS capability, has made getting lost while traveling less likely, even though I did find that back in the days of folding maps and getting lost I made some of my best photographs. A downside to social media is the way it has made it harder to take photographs in certain places––old buildings, empty lots, along the American highway, fenced-off landscapes––because increasingly such areas that were once open to exploration with a camera have become restricted zones due to bogus legal and security reasons, often based on fears that something someone does not want people to see might make its way to the internet. Consequently, no-trespassing signs, chain-link fences, and surveillance cameras are popping up everywhere these days. Even places where no-trespassing or no-camera signs are NOT posted, I have discovered that taking photos is forbidden anyway, as in a “public’ area of downtown Los Angeles where each time I try to take photographs I am run off by a security guard. 

Were people more approachable back then, in the 70s and 80s, when you’d ask to take their photo?

Yes and no. It does seem that social media has made some people more suspicious, from fear that their image is going to suddenly appear without their knowledge all over the internet –– as recently I was told by a person that I could not take their picture because they feared I might Photoshop their head onto a naked body and post it on Facebook!––and yet there are many people, seemingly the majority, who thrive on taking selfies and photographs of each other and posting them willy-nilly on Instagram or Facebook, belying this suspicion. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, it seems to me that part of the allure of social media is the way it seems to promise people that elusive 15 minutes of fame.

For the Sightseer series, you started taking photos in black and white and then realized something was missing, which prompted you to retrace the same journey and start again, this time shooting in color. However, you shot extensively in black and white before and after this project, including landscapes. I guess in this series, people’s outfit and their choice of colors were a key part of the composition.

Yes, color became key to the Sightseer series, I would say second to the style of clothing people wore. I would work intuitively, looking firstly for striking colors in their clothing, with a particular eye for harmony but also for discordant color juxtapositions, with the overall goal of finding some visual relationship between color, posing, forms, shapes, not only in the people but in the surrounding landscape of colors, textures, and compositional elements which, hopefully, would all coalesce, including the “right” facial expressions, into an interesting interplay.

You had to wait long hours at the overlooks for the right people to create your humourous and harmonious compositions Has this approach of patiently waiting for the right composition to unfold been a consistent method across your other bodies of work as well?

Oh my, the hours I would wait! But I was younger then, and because waiting long hours had paid off in my previous photography, I continued the practice. But in later years, I have realized that by moving on, not waiting, there was invariably another photograph just around the corner, often better. Edward Weston once said he never waited for the light, for the same reason.

You have self-published a long list of books. What makes you so attracted to them?

I have total control! I can select the photographs, create the layout, choose the font, come up with a title, and write whatever I want on its pages.  For me, having that kind of complete control is pure art-making.

INTERVIEW FROM TWO ITALIAN RASCALS MAGAZINE - ISSUE 3 AMERICAN DREAM

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AN EXTRACT FROM 'FIELD NOTES' - BY ROGER MINICK

It wasn’t long before I became aware of something else going on at the overlook: waves of tourists were continually arriving at the overlook’s parking lot in cars, buses and motorhomes, thrusting their way through this gauntlet of photographers not only for a clear view of the famous vista but also for the obligatory snapshot of themselves proving they were there. After witnessing this recurring bit of theater over several days, I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated with these visitors, recogniz­ing what a striking cross section of humanity they were. 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.

Three years later, I finally set out with my wife Joyce Perrin in our VW camper on a road trip around the western United States, with the sole purpose of photographing sightseers. During that first trip I photographed in black and white, and though I felt excited about the images I was getting, it was not until I returned to my darkroom and began to make prints that I realized something was missing. I soon realized that the irony and humor I had seen in the vivid colors of the people’s dress juxtaposed against the surrounding landscape, with its infinite palette, was getting lost in black and white.I immediately decided I must work in color. So the following year we retraced our route from the year before, and even prior to seeing a single print from that trip I knew that changing to color was the correct decision.

During the years I worked on the sightseer series,I devised my own approach to the subject. With a flash-mounted medium-format camera around my neck, I would spend long hours staked out at over­looks, looking to match up just the right person or couple or group with just the right background — always searching for that particular elusive “some­thing” that constitutes a compelling image. Some­times it was simply the style of clothing or the colors people chose to wear that caught my attention. Sometimes it was their mode of travel or the things they brought with them — their cameras, radios, binoculars, strollers, pets (this was pre-selfie and cellphone days) — that attracted me. Often I was attracted to the interaction within a group, hoping I could somehow capture a certain family dynamic on film. (Over time I even came up with theories based on my observations — my favorite: those families who were the best color-coordinated seemed to get along the best!)

When I approached people for a portrait, I tried to make my request clear and to the point, telling them that I was not trying to sell them anything. I explained that my wife and I were traveling around the country visiting most of the major tourist des­tinations so that I could photograph the activity of sightseeing. I would quickly add that I hoped the project would have cultural value and might be seen in years to come as a kind of time capsule of what Americans looked like at the end of the Twentieth Century; at which, to my surprise, I would see people often begin to nod their heads as if they knew what I was talking about.

I would then offer them a free portrait of themselves in front of whatever they had come to see, using a Polaroid camera I also had strapped around my neck. Once I had their permission, I went to work quickly, having learned that sightseers are on a tight sched­ule, are tired and exhausted from miles and miles of travel, and so had little patience for lots of photos. In fact, I generally felt lucky if I was able to get off three exposures in one session. If people were in a chatty mood or seemed to be particularly at ease, my encounters might last longer, but in most cases I made my portraits within a matter of minutes.

Roger Minick