This Is What You Look Like When You're On Holiday

"Never before have we had such an insatiable desire to record our holidays, with camera phones in our pockets and Instagram, Facebook and a thousand travel blogs at our fingertips," says Laurence Stephens, the documentary photographer behind the new photo book, Bored Tourists. "However, readers of this book might begin to question how enjoyable these experiences really are."

In the Instagram-era, many of us feel compelled to project a version of our coolest experiences on social media so that others can obsess over how much they'd like to live our lives. This is a phenomenon unique to our age – do I immerse myself in the moment, or do I put it on the back-burner while I pout?

Stephens says the judgments we make about each other's lives can "often make us feel disappointed with our own", and that they push us "to construct ever more flattering memories to post online, often to create the illusion we're having a better time than we actually are".

This, coupled with the fact we now have a constant stream of entertainment to draw us away from "real life" experiences, is inhibiting our capacity for curiosity.

I met him at Diddy's, a colourful neighbourhood cafe on Mare Street in east London, to find out why he went in search of the "not-so-elusive bored tourist".

"This is what I mean about people taking pictures they will have no use for," Stephens says. "Why is someone photographing bricks? What could they possibly need that photograph for? A large number of tourists invest a considerable amount of money in equipment like DSLR cameras with big zoom lenses, and I did often find myself wondering what happened to the thousands of replica images people take day-in, day-out at tourist hot-spots."

"The zoo was difficult to photograph, mainly due to the fact I wasn't allowed to," explains Stephens.
"So I'm wandering around with my camera under my arm and a keen eye on CCTV cameras and security guards, while looking out for people doing things that you might not expect."

"This is a favourite of mine," says Stephens. "It's a situation where I've come across a location with the potential for a good photograph and stayed with it for a long time. Every now and then someone would come up and start interacting with the bush; stroking the leaves, pulling them off.

"I got a few good shots, but then this guy comes along and leans right in to stare at them, and that was it – extraordinary behaviour in an ordinary situation."

"This was only captured due to the fact I was intensely focused on what was going on around me," says Stephens over a pint of pale ale. "I find working in this way to be very meditative, in the sense that you're walking around for hours, constantly aware of your surroundings, with the single intention of recording something unusual happening."

"I spotted the man from across the road and ran straight over to take the picture, just in case he suddenly moved," says Stephens. "Afterwards, I waited for around 15 minutes, convinced he must be posing for someone, but in the end accepted that he was just fast asleep, so I left him to it.

"In relation to the subject of the 'bored tourist', this image in particular goes far beyond anything I imagined I would find. A tourist with flip-up sunglasses and a neon pink suitcase, asleep on a mattress in the street – it's hard to convince people it wasn't a set-up, but it truly is just something I came across."

Bored Tourists is available to buy online via Hoxton Mini Press.

@matthabusby