Pictures of People Taking Pictures
Reflections On Being A Tourist (A New York Notebook, Part II)
Hello, dear reader! This is A Book Designer’s Notebook, a newsletter in which I write short, personal essays and occasional dispatches about what I’m reading and working on. This is one of those essays, and a follow-up to my last “notebook” post. You can read that here.
After landing at LaGuardia Saturday morning, I wandered around Astoria until the Museum of the Moving Image opened at noon. I came across a bagel shop, where I ate an everything bagel with chive cream cheese—hey, I wasn’t kissing anyone—and made some small talk with a local outside.
“I caught up to ya!” the man said. I had passed him earlier in my walk. He was middle-aged, with a canvas bag of groceries in each hand. His accent, maybe Queens, maybe mixed with something else, was a delight to my Michigan ears.
“Yeah, I’m just wandering around,” I said.
“My generation, we walk everywhere. Yours doesn’t. Look!” he said, as he turned his heel to show me his lean, muscled calf.
“I like to walk,” I said with a laugh and mock defensiveness. “But yeah, my legs aren’t quite as good as yours.” I turned my heel in the same way to show him mine.
Emboldened by this charming encounter, and hoping to play street photographer on my trip, I asked:
“Hey, can I take your picture?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “You a tourist?”
I’ve always loved street photography, but I am a busy, anxious, introvert whose camera has rarely seen the outside of the studio in years. My photography practice is very out of practice.
I thought I might rectify this on my recent birthday trip to New York City. I brought my camera with the notion that I would photograph “real” New Yorkers—whatever that means. My favorite photos I’ve ever taken have been of strangers. What better place to photograph them?
This is true, and people do it all the time. But the more I walked the city, the more ill at ease I felt about my intended project. To live in New York, a city with a population density of 29,000 per square mile,1 is by its very nature to be intruded upon. But for some reason—and it wasn’t just nerves about confrontation—I felt uncomfortable intruding with my camera. Like I hadn’t earned the right, not yet. What did I know about this place? What would taking pictures of my concept of New York say about what I think I know about this place? It felt arrogant. No doubt influenced by my encounter in Queens, I felt naive and Midwestern. I felt like a tourist.
“Who cares?” You might be thinking. “This guy thinks too much.” You are probably right, but I know no other way of existing. This is your brain on liberal arts education.
After a few more days of wandering the city—lunch with a designer in Brooklyn; a film screening in Greenwich Village—and only a handful of real photos taken, an idea occurred to me on Monday as I made my way toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s front steps: What if I took pictures of the other tourists? Specifically, the other people taking pictures?
The idea made me giddy. I had no qualms about photographing other visitors to the city. They were me; I was them. To take their picture was to intrude upon the intruder. We were in the same boat. I didn’t know I needed to be so philosophical about choosing a subject—yes, I am always this exhausting—but apparently I did, and I had found one.
If you are going to take pictures of tourists taking pictures, you must go to Times Square. For some, it seems, you have not really been to New York unless Milton Glaser’s I Love NY is emblazoned across your chest or you have bathed in the billboard lights of Times Square. These were the people I wanted to capture with my lens.
Dear reader, it was shooting fish in a barrel after starving for years. Maybe too easy for a more seasoned photographer, but I had so much fun.
“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” the Robert Capa maxim goes. It’s difficult to be anything but close enough with a 50mm prime lens in Father Duffy Square. On the steps of the Met, and later the New York Public Library, I tried to avoid notice. Not so on 42nd Street. In fact, I began to relish it. Being “caught”—and capturing it—was thrilling.
“Tourist,” in some minds and mouths, is a bad word. And, I admit, part of my glee at the idea of photographing them was derived from a disdain for the sort who dine at Eataly and take selfies with billboards. But, like much of my disdain with the world, it comes from seeing myself in the object of that disdain, and wanting a better, more thoughtful existence for all involved. Or—and let’s not rule this out—I’m just a pretentious asshole.2
I think I am going to take pictures of people taking pictures for a long time. I see these photographs as both a critique and a tacit acknowledgment of my uneasy belonging to this group, called tourist, that holds my attention. And I want to explore that a whole lot more.
So yeah, I’m a tourist. These are my pictures.
That’s all for this time. Thanks so much for reading and indulging this post about photography from something called “A Book Designer’s Notebook.” I’d love to hear what you think about this post, photography, or tourism!
United States Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/PST045222
Feel free to weigh in on that in the comments.
Love love love!!!
Funny that I want to get back into street photography again and this was a great idea! Thanks for sharing!