Artistic License

(Rome, 2001)

Sitting for a duet portrait, this amiable fellow’s girlfriend has just gotten up from her half. And there he is. Nothing yet has been added to the drawing of the girl, smiling blond and cute, on the easel next to him.

This image combines several of my favorite elements. I love situational visual jokes or puzzles caused by point-of-view juxtaposition. I like my jokes to be gentle; they should be sharable with the “victim.” I enjoy combining three-dimensional and two-dimensional elements in the same picture. I like depicting process. Performance is a “process,” and sitting for a portrait in public is a small performance. And I particularly love photographing tourists.

Ah, tourists.

Rubes among the jaded, they walk slowly through our public spaces. (They are actually looking at their surroundings!) They buy ice cream, give change to performers, and pay to have their portraits done. They keep afloat an intangible economy that we’d all miss were there no tourists to support it. We often speak ill of tourists, for all their awkwardness. But they are us. All tourists are locals from elsewhere. They are any of us who have ever traveled … when we’ve allowed our protective egos to drop. That’s when we’ve engaged as the participating audience, with generous understanding that cameras are for pointing and shooting. It’s when we’ve allowed ourselves, wide-eyed and good natured, to be lovingly humiliated. And, always, we’ve return from our travels with hilarious stories—in which we are always the butts of the jokes.

As a photographer, it is that personality displacement that makes tourists so easy and interesting to photograph. So whenever I travel, I shift my camera from the tourist attraction (here, the Spanish Steps of Rome), to the tourists within the attraction. As fellow tourists—photographer and subject both—we are sharing in our giddy defenselessness, finding comfort in our shared otherness, regardless of where we came from to be there.