Tapestry
I visited the Hajj exhibition at the British Museum today. The queue to buy the ticket looked worse than it was. The queue to enter the exhibition wasn’t so bad but I was a bit frustrated that everyone thought that they needed to queue for every exhibit. I skipped a few at the front and browsed around. A good exhibition but a lot of it was writing and photographs. They told the history and the story of the Hajj which is interesting but I like to see some exhibits and there were a reasonable number of these. Mostly tapestries but also some clothes worn during Hajj and a lot of old books. The tapestries were pretty amazing and many featured Arabic writing. It would have been nice to have some translations of this. The numbers of people made it difficult to get a good look at the explanatory text for each item but I guess I’m a bit impatient with this sort of thing. I like to hop from one thing to another and I hate queuing.
In fact queueing seemed to be a central theme to this exhibition in more ways than one. One of the key features of the Hajj is that each pilgrim walks 7 times around a large black stone cube known as the Kaaba at the Masjid al-Haram. Thousands of pilgrims attend and many photos showed the swirling people. As a keen photographer, these images piqued my interest. Many were shot at night, apparently under floodlights, and showed thousands of people stationary amongst a blur of others. I speculate that a fairly unique part of this ritual is that the people are either in motion, walking in the same direction, or they are absolutely still in meditation or prayer and that this is a great photographic opportunity.
The part or the exhibition that I liked best was the modern Islamic art which would not have looked out of place in Tate Modern. A good exhibition but I think the lesson is to rent one of those talking boxes which will explain stuff as you wander around.
The Hajj exhibition is open now at The British Museum on Great Russell Street in London and runs to the 15th April 2012. Entrance to the museum is free though they request a donation of £5. The Hajj exhibition tickets are £12. The nearest tube stations is Tottenham Court Road12.
Roses
Photography
travel photography – Objectifying the subject
Tags: Andaman Islands, Art, cameras, developing world, flickr, human safaris, India, Jarawa, Jarawa people, photographer, photography, The Guardian, The Long Way Home, Tourism, tourists, Travel, Uganda
The Long Way Home
Recently The Guardian ran an article reporting that India is to crackdown on what are termed “human safaris” where comparatively rich tourists visit the Jarawa tribe people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The Jarawa people have long been isolated from the rest of the world and are now being affected by a major road built across their land by the Indian government. A video accompanied the report showing Indian tourists getting the tribes people to dance for food.
Of course we sympathise with the Jarawar and abhor the idea that tourists casually throw them food in order to capture a few second of video footage.
But are we so very different? As a keen photographer I keep an eye on Flickr and, today, I came across this picture which appealed to me. The picture shows a couple of Ugandan children walking down a dirt road carrying baggage on their heads. The girl also carries a large container probably for water. It’s a nice shot. The colours are subtly beautiful and the girl’s expression is interesting.
But take a step back here. How would we feel if tourists wandered around poor areas of America with expensive cameras, capturing images of people struggling with bags and then drove back to their hotels in the evening to eat and drink too much?
I am in no way condemning the photographer of this shot. I have taken similar pictures and have to defend photography as an art form and state that, while the streets of western countries are fantastic subjects for photography the scale is less and less human. The beauty of pictures such as The Long Way Home may be related to their simplicity and humanity.
I guess there have always been disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have nots but these days cheap air travel seems to allow we who live in the rich world to objectify people from the “developing world” without a thought.
Vietnamese Girls