As a roving amateur photographer, it's very tricky to get portraits of strangers. Whenever I do happen to manage it, I am most grateful. Mostly I have to stick to scenery and the physical environment around me but - if the truth be known - I would love to have gathered hundreds more pictures of people. And I am talking about willing strangers - not secretly snapped pictures of unaware subjects.
I know I am not alone in being fascinated by faces - reading what's behind the eyes, trying to see into someone else's otherness. Throughout my life, I have doodled and my doodles are almost exclusively of faces. Yes, I have created thousands of faces with pens and pencils but to acquire photos of faces sometimes seems taboo.
Anyway, today Phoebe was keen for me to show her a pictures of me stroking a tiger. This happened in northern Thailand in April 2011 but I don't think Phoebe believed me.
With a little scrolling through my archives I was able to locate the picture quite easily. She was duly impressed.
It was almost time for her to go home. After she had gone, I flicked through other images I had gathered in Thailand around the same time. I was reminded of a little side trip I took to a kind of rural show village occupied by members of the Karen or Kayan hill tribe.
These people have had a long tradition connected with neck rings. Some of their women still wear heavy brass rings that push down the collarbone and rib cage to create an elongated neck look. As a nominated girl advances through her adolescence, more rings are gradually added.
The practice is quite abhorrent in my view. It is difficult to imagine the discomfort and pain that the long-necked Karen women must endure and you wonder - how do they sleep at night?
And yet my portrait at the top of this blogpost seems to show a dignified, calm and healthy young woman who is getting on with life in spite of the odd cultural tradition that has arguably blighted her life. Below, a younger Karen girl near the start of her neck ring journey...
Was Phoebe's request perhaps motivated by the recent tiger tragedy? In an amazing -to me at least - small world moment, a lifetime friend visiting from Doncaster told me that his son and young grandchild were at the wildlife place on the day when it was closed down (though they were looking at gentler creatures).
ReplyDeleteRe. Phoebe's request - you guessed correctly Marcellous. What a co-incidence that your longtime friend was at the wildlife park on the very day of the tragedy!
DeleteMy friend's son and grandchild. Not sure if a coincidence but a surprising thread stretching across the world to an event that otherwise seems v distant. (The v is for Phoebe.)
DeleteThe practice does seem rather awful but then perhaps they think similarly of westerners changing their bodies in unnatural ways. Yorkshire men and tigers aren't really a good combination.
ReplyDeleteHull City are The Tigers so I had to get in that caged enclosure.
DeleteI wonder what their reasoning is for this procedure.
ReplyDeleteBeauty and suppression I think.
DeleteI have heard in the past about these neck ring people and have also heard that once on, they can never be removed because the neck will collapse. I don't remember if the men also have the neck rings or just the women?
ReplyDeleteIt's just some of the women Elsie - not all of them by any means.
DeleteI won't go into a tirade against so-called "beauty ideals" that have made life for women (and some men) extremely uncomfortable and unhealthy for millenia, but I agree that both girls look neither unhappy nor mistreated. Of course, appearances can be deceptive.
ReplyDeleteIt's lovely that Phoebe believed you when she saw the picture and did not exclaim "You've done it with AI!"
At five going on six she still has no idea about AI. For now, such issues do not exist for her.
DeleteNot sure that after recents events regarding tigers, it is a good idea to be showing pictures of you stroking one to young minds! Sorry, don't mean to be controversial., but is was my immediate thought!
ReplyDeleteYou are entitled to your reaction and your opinion Frances. Phoebe has visited that wildlife park three times and probably saw the killer tiger - though of course, it was not the tiger's fault.
DeleteI seldom take photos of people. I do have an ongoing selfie project. I hope the tiger was well fed and well trained.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the tiger in Thailand was sedated.
DeleteTyger, Tyger, burning bright,
ReplyDeleteIn the forests of the night ;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry ?
You did what William Blake never did.
You gazed into Tyger's watchful eyes and stroked his lustrous coat.
What a memory you created for your grandchildren & great-grandchildren !
Those beautiful children with damaged collarbones and ribcages !
Travel writers in Japan saw crippled old women who had suffered foot binding.
An older cousin rebuked me for saying crippled. It describes physical abuse.
Your older cousin was wrong to rebuke you. You were using the nasty word "crippled" correctly.
DeleteJohn Steinbeck's Burning Bright is about old age & fatherhood.
DeleteMary McCarthy who wrote nothing I ever enjoyed loathed Steinbeck.
William Blake upon reading Paradise Lost said John Milton was of
the Devil's party and didn't know it. Was Cromwell the model for Satan ?
The Chinese did the foot binding, I am pretty sure the Japanese did not.
DeleteNeck rings or not, those girls are beautiful. I'm so sorry that their culture deems them most attractive with stretched necks. Sounds like the foot binding of Chinese women which involved the breaking of arches, their toes folded under, and then the feet tightly bound by strips of cloth.
ReplyDeleteWhat about women's high heels in America and western Europe? I mean, why?
DeleteIt's interesting what different cultures consider beautiful, isn't it? At the very least the rings seem like they'd be uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteI'm just the opposite of you on portraits. I am not interested in posed portraits in the least. But I love candid ones, when people are acting natural and their true selves are on display.
"I am not interested in posed portraits in the least..." You mean you weren't at all interested in my two picture of Karen girls?
Delete