This morning I flew
from Madrid to Prague. As it happened, I
got to the gate early. Being first in line,
I noticed a large brown bundle in the doorway that led to the plane. It looked like a tarpaulin left by
a worker. Then the tarpaulin moved. It moved again. I was startled. I got the attention of the ticket taker. He glanced over his
shoulder in the direction I was pointing, saw the bundle move, walked over and shook it.
From the deep brown
folds a figure emerged, a sturdy heavyset woman in a red dress. She had a bandana around her head. The ticket
taker indicated that she couldn't sleep in the doorway because people would
soon be passing through.
She gathered up what
turned out to be an ample brown shawl. With her free hand she took hold of her
shoes and, barefooted, moved to a ticket counter about five feet away. The space underneath it was
unobstructed. Like a bear in a cave, she
lay down under the desk, pulled her brown shawl around her and went back to
sleep.
I asked the ticket
taker if the woman was waiting for a flight.
He nodded. I was struck by the fact that her sleeping under a ticket
counter was not a problem for him. As best as I could
make out with my halting Spanish, he said that Terminal 4 was an international
airport, that people from all over the world came through and that, all in all,
he prefers to live and let live.
There was a lot to
like about this incident. I liked its unexpectedness, an undulating, amorphous
bundle in an airport doorway and its transformation into a hefty Venus
rising up out of the folds. I liked the
flowing transition of the woman from the space in the doorway to the space
under the desk. I imagined that both spaces
provided her with a corner and hence an enclosure and hence some sense of snug
security while she slept. Three minutes, probably less, had passed between the
time she got up and the time she was asleep again in her new space.
But what I liked
most about the incident was the total absence of judgment on the part of the
ticket taker. That, I thought, was worth
a blog.
I went over to the
place where the woman was sleeping and took a photograph with my iPhone. (My son advised me when I first started blogging
that photographic accompaniment was an absolute necessity.)
No sooner had I
taken the picture when a young man sitting nearby said, "You are being disrespectful to her."
"How could
I?" I replied. "She is sound asleep."
"You should ask
her permission before you take her picture," said the young man.
"If I do that, I
will wake her up. I am not being disrespectful. I am being considerate."
"It doesn't
matter," he insisted.
"You should not take her picture without her permission. It is
disrespectful."
"But her back
is turned to the camera. She is wrapped
in a shawl. It is impossible to see her
face. She is completely unrecognizable."
 |
| The ticket counter |
So my blog turns out
not to be about withholding judgment after all. It is about being judged.
So much for live and
let live.
Was I
disrespectful? I am not sure. If it were true that our images unequivocally
belong to us, then certainly I was. But that would mean that every airport surveillance camera is disrespectful of every
person it images. Ditto your neighborhood ATM, or supermarket. It is hard to say "yes" to that, at
least, for me it is.
What is different
about my picture taking? My guess is
that it comes down to what I intended to do with the image. So here it is.
You be the judge.
