Taking to the Freedom Trail

Recently, Dave and I reignited a collaborative project that's been in the making for over a year. The general idea was to photograph ourselves at various Revolutionary War sites around Boston, playing with the idea of tourism and inserting ourselves as a same-sex couple into the historical narrative of American "revolutionaries". That Boston was the city where the American Revolution began, and over 200 years later was the site of the court decision that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to recognize same-sex marriage was intriguing to us. We were also reacting to what was then the fledgling craze for tea and tri-cornered hats that some Americans were having, and wanted our own piece of the action.

The first images we made for the project were composed by ourselves using my Hasselblad. We set up the shots, set the timer and ran into the shot, performing a ritual repeated by tourists the world over. On certain shoots we had the help of our friend Neil Contractor to make sure we were in focus and press the shutter. There was an interesting tension in these well-composed, well-lit photographs of us essentially performing as tourist memes, but the project seemed to call for something different.

As we continued to work, the idea that we were performing first and foremost and photographing as documentation seemed more in line with our original intentions. Therefore, the photography would need a more incidental, amateur quality. It seemed to make more sense that by using a snapshot-like aesthetic, we would be able to investigate and subvert the generally heteronormative culture of tourism by using its own language. We revisited an earlier idea of having other people take our picture using a digital camera, but presenting a series of images solely of ourselves taken by anonymous, un-shown passersby seemed to be missing something.

We wanted to capture a sense of the transaction that takes place at tourist sites when total strangers engage in the exchange of a favor: taking pictures for one another. After the act, each party is left with a photograph, invested with all the significance of memories, but the other person is quickly forgotten and never seen again. We realized that what was central to the project was the creation of a dialogue, and a disruption of the bubble-space of defensiveness and alienation that is often central to the mentality of tourism.

The approach we developed out of this was that we would ask people to take our picture and also to allow us to take a picture of them. The images would then be presented as a series of diptychs with no accompanying text expect for possibly the location of the image. The dialogue created is broadly about the experiences one has visiting a place they are not native to, the lack of interaction between visitors and natives of a place (except through the monetized environment of hospitality and food-service), and specifically about our interaction with these people and our identity as a same-sex couple.

So, with our new plan of action devised and digital camera in hand, we took to the streets of Boston's North End on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon to see who we could rope into our project. We thought a lot beforehand about how to pitch our project to people, and it was a challenge to get people to accept having their picture taken by strangers. We found that people responded better when we went further in depth about who we were and the idea behind the project. Interestingly, foreign tourists seemed much more interested in participating and talking about the project. Even the ones who declined to participate were still interested in hearing about the project. The Americans we encountered were generally standoffish and seemed to be rushing to their next destination, though I should add this was not true of the ones who participated.

The project is tentatively titled "Significantly Othered". Here are the images so far: