Tourists

This is a project that I worked on during my third year at the Institute for Art, Design and Technology in Dungeons Laoghaire where I was doing my Photography BA. I started out following tourists and photographing them in their unguarded moments, inspired by Martin Parr. I realised that my approach was clichéd and wasn’t really working. By repeating my attempts to capture tourists on camera I came to realise that they consumed what they saw with their cameras. It was playing a very important role in their holiday. I started to take photos of tourists taking photos of each other. In themselves they were interesting and I’ve included a few of those types of photos here. However as time went on I began to think about the kind of photographs that tourists were taking and where might they end up. I persuaded some tourists to show me their favourite photograph of their time in Ireland on their digital camera. The resulting interaction are what makes this series work.