Twins with Matching Outfits at Lower Falls Outlook

In the 1970s at Yosemite, Roger Minick realized that young photographers were taught to photograph the park from the same famous overlooks, established by the earliest park photographers. Seeking to produce a unique image, he turned his camera on a ubiquitous, but largely obfuscated element of the parks: its tourists. In his Sightseer Series, spanning over 20 years, Minick examines the people who visit the parks and the particularly American brand of nature tourism that they practice. In the 1980s, Minick began travelling through the national parks, asking visitors at those famous overlooks if he could take their pictures. Twins with Matching Outfits at Lower Falls Overlook exemplifies the style Minick employs in the series, often resembling a snapshot from a family picture album. Minick used the parks to evaluate American identity through families, tourism practices, and dress.

The identical twins mirror the symmetry of the falls, suggesting a symbiosis between nature and its observers. The boundaries of the image closely frame the tourist-twins; the Lower Falls serve as a backdrop to their portrait. Minick further diminishes the Falls’ appearance by compressing the space between foreground and background, resulting in the waterfall appearing very small in relation to the women. Minick also used flash to give the picture a sense of the artificial light one would find in a studio. As a result, the photograph becomes a portrait of two tourists, rather than a conventional sublime, unpeopled landscape. Minick manages to re-people the parks and highlight human interaction with the natural spaces, highlighting the curated nature of these park excursions. (Source: https://www.americansuburbx.com/2015/07/roger-minick-sightseer.html)