User:Perryward

Roger Minick (born July 13, 1944) is an American Photographer who is widely known for his series of photographs documenting tourists in the National Parks of the United States. The series, called "Sightseer", has been published in numerous books and widely exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe.

Early Years
Roger Minick was born in Ramona, Oklahoma, in 1944, and grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. In 1956 his family moved to Southern California, where he lived until he was twenty. Starting in 1964, Minick attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a BA in history in 1969. While at UC Berkeley, Minick began an apprenticeship in photography at the ASUC Studio, a student arts facility on the UC campus. Working on staff at the Studio from 1965 to 1975, Minick became Director from 1971 to 1975. During these years, Minick was also a regular instructor at the Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshops in the 1970s.

Studio Years
It was at the Studio when he began his first photo project, a documentary project on the land and people of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California. A resulting book, Delta West, (Scrimshaw Press, 1969) an award-winning book which was listed as one of “Fifty Best Books of the Year” by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, AIGA, was published in 1970. Also in that same year, Life Magazine, published an image from “Delta West”, titled “Cheng’s Hands, 1966″.

For Minick’s next photo project on the rural Ozarks of Arkansas begun in 1970, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972. A book resulted, entitled Hills of Home (Scrimshaw Press, 1975; Ballantine Books, 1976). His father Bob Minick wrote the text, which was a compilation of his stories and remembrances from having lived in the Ozarks; and also included in the book were etchings and lithographs by photographer Leonard Sussman, a coworker at the ASUC Studio.

While at the Studio, in addition to co-designing his own book Delta West with photographer Dave Bohn, as well as  designing his own book Hills of Home, Minick worked with other photographers designing their books: Margo Davis' Antigua Black (1973), Richard Misrach's Telegraph 3 AM (1974), and Steve Fitch’s Diesels and Dinosaurs (1976).

Post Studio Years
The year 1974 marked a turning point in Minick’s photography, a year when he shifted his photographic interests from the rural landscape to the urban landscape. Images for his "The Southland Series", of freeways, vernacular architecture, and portraits of people at fast-food outlets and shopping plazas in Southern California, were made between 1974 and 1976.



In 1977, Minick worked on a two-year National Endowment for the Arts Photo Survey project on the Mexican American community. This project, known as “Espejo”, was co-sponsored by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. Work from this project, which included five other photographers (Abigail Heyman, Mary Ellen Mark, Louis Bernal, Morrie Camhi, Neal Slavin), was exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California) in 1979. Under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts grant, Minick completed four photo projects: portraits of residents in East Los Angeles taken in front of street murals (one of which was featured in the "Asco (art collective) exhibit, "Elite of the Obscure" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), undocumented ﬁeld workers living and working on farmland near San Diego,  a photo essay of a Charro (rodeo) event near Riverside, California, and garment workers in downtown Los Angeles.

Minick’s best known photo project, the “Sightseer” series, in which he photographed tourists visiting the National Parks and Monuments in the United States, began in 1979. While the first few images for this project were in black and white, the project soon became Minick’s first experience working in color. The "Sightseer" images were first exhibited at the Grapestake Gallery in San Francisco in 1981 where they were reviewed by Thomas Albright in the San Francisco Chronicle. Images from this series were also included in the hardcover book and major traveling exhibition "American Photographers and the National Parks", sponsored by the National Parks Foundation. Minick’s best known image from the "Sightseer" series, “Woman at Inspiration Point, 1980”, was also included in the Oakland Museum of California 1989 exhibition "Picturing California", which traveled nationally. This same image was also featured on the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition. In the year 2000, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art also featured the same image on billboards and as banners on light posts around Los Angeles advertising their exhibition "Made in California". Minick is currently working on a book called Sightseer with a foreword by Lucy R. Lippard.

In the years since the Sightseer project, Minick has continued to work in color. Between 1981 and 1984, he made a series of color photographs in enclosed shopping malls, a project he calls "The New Main Street". In 1981, his book “The Oakland Paramount”, a series of color photographs of the interior of the newly renovated Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, was commissioned by the theatre in 1981.

Over the years Minick’s photography has been exhibited widely. In 1986 his work was included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art traveling exhibition and hardcover book Photography in California: 1945-1980.

Minick’s first street photography began in 1987, and for several years he worked mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, taking color photographs of ironic and sometimes surreal situations, a project he called "Perambulations".

In 1984, realizing he wanted to teach at the college level, Minick entered graduate school at the University of California, Davis. His Master of Fine Arts graduation exhibit in 1986 consisted of both a series of paintings and a series of color photographs. Minick then went on for the next twenty-five years to teach at several photography schools throughout Northern California, including San Francisco State University, Sacramento State University, San Francisco City College, and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Between 1996 and 2000, Minick worked on a comprehensive photo project photographing the American landscape in black and white, with particular emphasis on the delicate balance between the natural landscape and human encroachment, a project he calls "American Biographics". Also, during these same years, Minick returned to his "Perambulations" project, this time working in black and white, and opening up the project to include images he made during numerous road trips around the United States.

Having always had a keen passion for other media besides photography, Minick, since his studies in graduate school, has created a series of mixed-media works on canvas, wood and inside glass-covered boxes which combine his own photographs with found images, text and miscellaneous objects. Also, in response to his interest in less traditional ways of making photographs, Minick has recently photographed extensively with an inexpensive plastic lens camera called a Holga, known for its idiosyncratic vignetting, focusing and halation of light.

Digital Work
With the arrival of the digital age, and becoming experienced with Photoshop and inkjet printing, Minick has begun experimenting with new forms of image-making, creating numerous triptychs, grids and montages. With the appearance of the iPhone, Minick has used its camera and infinite array of apps to complete several projects, both from travels in the United States and Europe.

Minick's current book projects include: Cell People (a series of photographs in color of people using their cellphones), The Eternal Stare (Greco-Roman stone heads from museums in Europe and the United States), Parthenon Marbles (marble statuary from the Acropolis which are currently displayed at the British Museum), Seen from Train (two round-trips on trains between NYC and San Francisco), and Fifty (fifty photo projects by Minick over fifty years, 1964 to 2014). Minick is also currently creating new books from his Delta and Ozark projects, in which he intends to include work never seen before.