Taking Pictures of Poor People (in China)

The act of representing others almost always involves violence to the subject of representation.

–Edward Said, Orientalism

 

At one point on the broiling afternoon of the first of August, while wandering alone in Xi’an’s Muslim Market, I realized I’d taken a lot of pictures of poor people.

Ah, how picturesque is poverty! So quaint, so very foreign!

I don’t like it, but that’s what happened on this China trip. Old men slicing slabs of meat, old ladies collecting cans, and the lady here, who ran the yurt where I stayed in Inner Mongolia. (I suspect she has a lot of money, as the family owns coal-rich land in mining country, but she doesn’t look like it.) For almost two weeks my subjects (now there’s a word with a darkly double meaning) have been engaged in such charmingly archaic acts as carrying water, herding sheep or riding a bike. Some activity that ensures all who see my snapshots that I’ve gone far, far away.

It is a desperate need to feel superior? Is it a lazy woman’s means of proving the literal and symbolic mileage? These definitely don’t seem like people who will (or can) retaliate if I steal a photo of them. And I probably won’t be judged by others for taking the shot. (Again, the language of photography strikes me as aggressive.)

Back in New York, I’d never take a photo of a woman collecting empty plastic bottles.

In my defense, I’m no photographer and the poor people are the easy shots. Maybe if I had a better camera I could zoom in on a face that revealed its foreignness, its utter un-Americanness despite the jeans-and-tee uniform, the whole-bodied embrace of 20th century consumer fetishism. But I only had a phone camera.

China, forgive me: They were everywhere.

Two Rail Europe Trips: One Article and a Sidebar (finally)

Two Rail Europe Trips: One Article and a Sidebar (finally)

 

Like many Americans, I fell for rail travel thanks to a Eurail pass right after college.

A bottle of wine, a notebook and a broad window were the formula for really seeing the Continent, and I swore I’d return to the trains again. . . . 

What I always say about Paris.

I always say that Paris is so capacious, so gorgeous, so generous, that it can be anyone’s town.

I like to say that Paris can be my Impressionism-loving and DeGaulle-leaning mother’s favorite place on earth and it can be wholly and properly beloved by the anarchist-squatter-Berliner I met there in the 80s. In Paris, there’s always room for actual great writers and for the smart-shopping college girls coming through semester after semester (some of whom are writers, by the bye) and for the art smugglers and the necessary hash dealers. What I mean is: there is enough in Paris for 27 million tourists every year to arrive and find some beauty, or rather to be found by beauty, to be electrocuted it, to let beauty do to them what beauty does to a human. Enough so that 27 million of them, of us, get Paris for ourselves, forever.

But secretly, I know and love the real Paris.