In the end, I took very few plop shots, but managed to get some other photos that I am really happy with. I'm going to put them up in the order that they were taken. You can see that I start out with the typical Deb photos: animals, people taken from afar, crumbly buildings. Oh, and plops. Don't forget the plops. I tend to take a lot of pictures of animals, but the reason for that goes beyond the fact that I love them - they usually don't seem to notice, and they generally don't mind (Well, except for cows. They DO mind. A lot.). Most importantly, there is no culture gap to worry about. The street dog isn't going to think I am mocking her sagging nipples. She isn't going to feel ashamed that she is picking through the trash for food, or feel like I am exploiting her poverty for entertainment puposes. And she certainly isn't going to worry about these pictures showing up on the internet.
But people are tricky. You never know how someone is going to react to you taking a picture of them. And especially as an outsider in this country, I am concerned about the implications that can arise when I take a picture of someone who is dressed differently or whose living conditions differ drastically from my own. I worry about it so much that I rarely have the guts to take the photos I want to take. So it is always a pleasant surprise when people seem eager to pose.
It happened yesterday as I was photographing that dog in the trash. An old man saw me taking pictures and started gesturing for me to come over. I came closer, and he started posing, lifting these plastic bins and nodding towards the camera in my hand. I was so excited to have that shot, and he seemed genuinely pleased when I showed him the digital image on the screen. After that, I wondered if other people would be willing to pose for me. So I asked. Or got Tim to ask, when my shyness creeped back up.
It was still really awkward. I wondered if I should give the family of laborers living in two tents and the skeleton of the house they are building for someone else some money. They didn't ask and I didn't want to insult them. Would that be insulting? I don't know! This is why it is so fucking uncomfortable! I'm hung up on ideas I got from living in a pluralist society, with a sociologist mother and a politically-correct liberal arts education. I don't know what these people are thinking, what the proper thing to do is, or even whether they are substantially aware of the digital media age. They don't have televisions or computers, and most of the labor class have never gone to school. Ugh. Learning Kannada would help. I could give them compliments to put them at ease. Or I could lie and say I am a photography student doing an assignment for school. Or something like that. I'm going to have to get someone to help me out with this at work. A script, maybe. But in the meantime, I think I am going to print their photos out for them. Hopefully, they will be happy to have pictures of their baby. I'll do the same for the little boy who lives in a shack on my street with the people we gave all those packets of Pop Rocks to that one time. That makes me feel a little less anxious about this whole taking pictures of people thing, but I'm still not entirely comfortable with it. Definitely something to work on going forward. That and getting more good plop shots, of course.
