Tourists and Picture Taking
How many photos do you have in your phone? Probably 5,000 because you don’t drop them in a SUMMER PHOTOS file in your computer, then delete. Just kidding!
What has been deleted though is asking strangers to take your picture on a beach in Amanzimtoti, KZN, a mountain top in Lesotho, Africa or Niagara Falls Canada. Selfies do all that now, even suicidal selfies, which were meant to be ‘cool.’
Most strangers loved helping tourists with taking pictures. Maybe they liked the idea that their bridge, cathedral or Great Wall of China will be seen all over the world. Tourists then posed and locals happily pressed CLICK. Tourists would fly back home and send the film to the lab to be developed.
That was a side of humanity we took for granted. Human beings don’t like each other in general. There’s very little love between friends, family, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, thieves and followers. But that humanity enabled strangers to give other strangers their cameras. ‘Excuse me, could you please take us a picture?’
You find that a lot in classic movies. Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali is a case in point. Ajay Devgn’s character loves Aishwarya Rai’s character. She loves someone else. They are under a bridge in Italy, somewhere.
She asks a stranger to take them a picture. The stranger doesn’t like what he sees, so he tells them to come closer. They do that woodenly. He asks them to put arms around each other and then the finale: Smile. That’s the movie, right there.
Your camera phone gives you the independence to record your own page views, but it has robbed you of a brief encounter to say thank you, to a stranger that helped you record one page view in another place, another country.
This is another ‘writtern podcast’ from Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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