Final: Interview (Evan Merck)

How does this project relate to the class?

Reading the New York stories that were the subject of the second half of the semester, I could not help but turn the lens inward and wonder what my New York story was. While discussing Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York during class, we inquired as to the “colossal” nature of the city. One of the most convincing—or most thought-provoking—explanations was that New York exists as a grouping of individuals en masse, so much so that individual identities and thoughts are shared in some collective way.

I wanted to explore this a bit further. New York is simultaneously a city of natives, newcomers, and tourists—it caters to all at once, each part (Times Square and my unassuming apartment) just as “real” as the other. How did my, albeit brief, New York experience compare to that of a tourist? Where does the tourist go, and how do those patterns correspond with my own everyday tendencies? These questions led me to the bus tour. Though the photo essay does not explicitly relate to a particular reading, I think it touches on the class’ most recent and most project—to think closely about how you are situated within the city, and how your experience relates to others’.

Do you think your project successfully comments on the difference between your own experience and the tourist experience?

I deliberately left this a bit ambiguous. I found it surprisingly easy to “act” like a tourist—here is more confirmation that you can buy a new identity quite easily. I originally intended to offer a harsher criticism of the tourist culture, but because I shifted so easily into that role I thought another sort of implicit commentary was more appropriate: the line between the tourist and the resident is not always clearly defined. That, in fact, is a “colossal” aspect of New York. Anyone can be anyone at any time, whether by choice or by accident.

I tried to capture this in the “voice” of the essay itself by speaking like a tour guide—quotations are added at times, though I think it remains a bit unclear where my voice starts and ends. Another way this is accomplished is through the choices I made as to which places to include. Any tour guide makes choices about what to include and what to ignore—I am guiding you through a guided tour, and the process of omission is no different.

Did you speak to the tour guides?

Yes. I told them why I was there and they were happy (and a bit confused) to chat for a couple of minutes. The man behind the microphone was Ken, a New York native who has been working for CitySights NY for nine months. Ken grew up in the projects near the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge (the “hookers” projects, as he said during the tour), and now lives in Park Slope. His friend and fellow tour guide Joe came along too. Joe wanted to hear Ken’s tour so he could add some new comments to his own routine. At some point, Joe wants to study film at Tisch.

I asked them what they thought of the tour’s route—being so centered on Manhattan (you only go to Brooklyn to get a better view of Manhattan from across the river). They said that there are so many neighborhoods that people don’t get to see because they are told to go to the tourist sites. After I talked to them during the pit stop at the Fulton Ferry Landing, I noticed a change in Ken’s tone over the loudspeaker. He brought in more of his personal story (“I don’t know how my wife comes home after seeing these houses,” “I wish we’d go a bit further down that road”). It was not Ken’s goal to be the mysteriously absent tour guide—as if previously recorded and not subject to human choice.

How do you justify using other people’s pictures instead of your own?

Almost everyone on the tour had a camera in hand—even families, who presumably share the photos anyway, had a camera per person. The person to camera ration is so extreme that it seems that merely seeing New York is not enough. You have to capture the city—“shoot” it—or it does not exist. The irony here is strong: the desire to document one’s own individual New York experience is done in the least individual way possible. On a guided tour, side by side with the fellow photographer, the tourist does not make choices about what to photograph—everything the guide highlights is immediately captured by the busload.

What is more individual or spectacular about one person’s picture compared than someone else’s? Though it is easy to be cynical about this mass-produced New York image, that attitude is not particularly productive. I decided to use others’ photos of buildings—some professional, some taken from an aerial perspective not possible from a tour bus—to make clear the disconnect between the experience of the tour and the monuments that are the subject of the tour. If I have done a good enough job, it is possible to follow along with the tour with any picture. More important than the picture, perhaps, is the route—what places could be photographed on the tour. The photos are not my own, but neither was the tour, and neither is New York.