Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
I almost never take photographs of children for obvious reasons. People freak. It has basically become a total no no. It is even a no no to broach this subject. And so I flout both the taboo of the act and the chat with this week’s photographs. Why? Because it seems weirder to me to avoid than to not. In the words of Scroobius Pip: “Thou shalt not think any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile. Some people are just nice. ”
There was a case a while back that a school banned adults from attending the kid’s sports day in order to prevent any potential threat…when you are restricting life to this extent in the name of protection something has gone horribly wrong with society. There are numerous incidents on Facebook when people have their accounts frozen on obscenity charges for having what are no more than innocent family snaps. Child pornography exists and is one of the most horrific things on this planet but does everything have to be viewed with that slant, especially when its clearly anything but?
I was told off once for taking a picture of two kids on a donkey on Blackpool beach, sun shining, blue skies, Tower in the background, a great shot of old school England and the guy pulling the donkey saw me take the picture and called me a pervert. And that’s how bad its got. I’m really not sure how tantalising the picture would have been for anyone to be honest, regardless of their sexual proclivity. Maybe he thought I had a thing for donkeys. Or maybe he thought I was like that woman who fell in love with the Eiffel Tower and I was secretly lusting after Blackpool’s most iconic landmark…it is a rather attractive piece of architecture I have to admit, not really my type though.
Inappropriate joking aside, you can’t even smile at a kid these days without it being a problem. Poor kids, their whole lives will be spent with people ignoring them and avoiding them. A friend of mine works in a kindergarten in America and the carers aren’t even allowed to pick up a kid and comfort them if its crying. That is pretty messed up.
Truth is, the main reason I uploaded this set of photographs was not that I particularly wanted to broach this subject at all, I really just wanted to post the photograph I featured on Monday and the others sort of followed suit. I just loved the way the old man was sat there, with his walking stick, staring at the kid whizzing past on his skateboard, pining for his own lost and almost forgotten childhood, lamenting quietly that his days of mobility & youth were long gone. This is obviously projection on my part. I guess I could have thought he was some dirty old perve checking out the kid but I just can’t think like that. If you want to that’s your business but I choose not to look at everyone with this overly suspicious paranoid mind set.
I feel sometimes that as a country we feel collectively responsible for the horrors committed by Jimmy Saville and if everyone was just hyper vigilant we could stop it from happening again but we can’t do that by treating everyone as if they were a monster like him. Yesterday Cliff Richard was the latest innocent victim of a witch hunt that seemed to serve no more purpose than to destroy more innocent lives rather than save them. We need to be vigilant and do everything we can to protect our young but treating the innocent masses based on the actions of the guilty few just doesn’t seem like a rational or productive way to go about it. Its exactly the same as saying that all afghans are evil because one massacred 50 people in Orlando. Lone destructive individuals shouldn’t be an excuse to treat an entire demographic the same way. (I will be delving into this more next week)
Please note: Normal service of photographs featuring only fully grown human beings will resume next week.