'The Tourists' is an ongoing project which began with a trip to Berlin in 2008. It was my first time in Berlin, and so I was soaking up all the main attractions and hot spots. When I have travelled before I have often thought about how easy it is to be sucked into the pointers from guidebooks and tourist boards, and often you arrive at landmarks not really knowing what you are doing there. So you turn your camera onto them, and dutifully record this part of your trip hoping perhaps to make some sense of it later. Though as you don't really engage with what you see this record, once you're back on home soil, means even less to you. So in Berlin I decided to change tack, turning my camera onto the other tourists, and see how they tried to engage with the landmarks. These images from Berlin are shown above, but since then the project has taken on a different aesthetic, and I have become more reductive, with just one image per place. In these most recent images I have centralised a figure, to emphasise how lost they seem, and to initiate the possibilty of a story about them.
