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Photo Album Travellers
Most of us are only interested in a travel event for as long as we can get pictures for our collection - something to boast about - and we learn nothing from such travels
The Hemis Festival, a photo opportunity.
This Buddhist festival – the most notorious in Ladakh and probably the largest and best-performed Tibetan Buddhism festival found anywhere, two days of colourful, costumed acts illustrating Buddhist philosophy – is the event or outing of the year for the local inhabitants, and they turn up in droves, some of them walking two days from mountain villages and sleeping on the ground on the banks of stream at Hemis so they can stay for the second day. To attend, employees take the day off work, and the peasants put three or four days’ supply of grub out for their donkeys and cows and sheep and chicken. Earnest and rowdy, the crowds jostle into the courtyard of the Hemis monastery, meticulously groomed – the men with their goatee and moustache rolled to tapering pencil-point ends, the women with woollen strings woven into their pleated ponytails – and dressed their best, encumbered under dirty-purple robes and vests and hats turned up at the side fringes, comical in their oriental shoes with the point at the toes curled up and backwards, bombastic with their necklaces and bracelets and earrings and bangles, and the women flaunting their special attire: the rough-cut shawl of sheep’s skin draped over their shoulders.
For travellers too, the festival is the highlight of a visit to Ladakh. And all of us, also, displayed a special kind of décor for the occasion: large and conspicuous cameras. To get pictures of the show with the appropriate detail and composition it was necessary to wriggle one’s way to the front of the concentric circles of spectators, leaning this way and that, blocking the view to the spectators behind you, stepping over some of squatting spectators, venturing into the space made for the participants (the actors had to look over their shoulders lest they trip over a Westerner kneeling behind them to get the perfect close-up). Some of the natives, visibly annoyed, bawled at Westerners to get out of the way, or tagged at their trousers; at one point some old women hurled stones at me. I saw their point and retreated, feeling insensitive.
Once the acts had taken one or two rolls of films, the attention of the photographers turned towards the spectators. These quintessentially outlandish mountain-characters, windmilling prayer wheels or fiddling prayer beads, had cameras thrust into their faces, their frugality celebrated. The photographers sidled up to them as if they were cute puppies slumbering on the road-verge, not bothering to ask them if they minded their picture being taken. Didn’t they see that what they were doing was invasive and condescending and patronising? Such insolent irreverence or ignorance towards people’s privacy filled me with shame. I retreated to the edges of the crowd, sulking at the corners. I concealed my camera.
At one point fifteen photographers crowded round an old woman seated alone on the ground. She looked ninety, her face deeply creased and contorted, but she might have been sixty (the oppressive dry mountain climate ages people quicker), and she just sat there, her face turned down, like a girl who had been lost but refused to cry or move. Now, she was being objectified for her frailty. I sat next to her, and the photographers waited for me to move; then they indignantly asked me to move out of the way. A Westerner in the picture would detract from the illusion of a chance encounter with an archetypal character – my presence ruined the atmosphere of exclusivity. I pointed my camera at the photographers; it made them angry, now cursing me, and I told them that I was only doing to them what they were doing to someone else. In the end I helped the woman to her feet and walked her towards stairs of the temple where she would look more dignified.
All these pictures, what for? For tardy self-pride, to flaunt a bursting album to family and friends and dinner guests. For self-aggrandising proof: the pictures as testimony of how far you have gone and how much you have seen and how exotic it all was. Stunning pictures, unforgettable vistas, outlandish characters – but what about the trip itself? What have you learned? What personal enrichment and revelations? How have your perceptions and worldview been transformed?
We are all prone to this condition where the urge to get good pictures of places visited and people seen ends up undermining the travel experience itself. A trip through Turkey some years ago marked the peak of my photographic obsession: in eight weeks I shot 2,000 slides. I might have became a better photographer, but a worse traveller, and an intrusive one – when I pointed the camera at people who shook their hands in back-off gestures, I snapped at them trigger-happily all the same. Then, at home, during dinner parties I would rig my projector and sit my friends through an hour-long documentary of slides. Many of them got bored; yes, the pictures are nice, but if they wanted to see a documentary they could have stayed at home and switched on the TV – what about my experience of Turkey? But my experience had become disjointed, reduced to a series of pictures. In my eagerness to record the places I was visiting I distracted myself from the here-and-now. I had spent half the days looking at things with photographic acumen, peeping through the camera at every vista that had photographic potential, finding the right angle, studying the light. Some days I got up at first light to stalk the area for pictures.
Taking pictures is a different manifestation of the same compulsion that makes some people scratch their initials in a beautiful landscape or at a famous monument – an attempt to freeze a memory in time, an announcement that you have been there, and being there becomes more important than what revelation could be had from that milieu. (An important reward of travel, in a larger significance, is the same thing: you earn the claim and the self-satisfaction of having been there.) And this is the anti-thesis of immersion travel for experience and wisdom and understanding.
Mind you, I still travel with a camera. Yet aware of the distance a camera puts between it and its subjects, and aware of the intrusion and superiority and irreverence that someone pointing a camera exudes, I take pictures discreetly and prudently, and never without someone’s consent. And I take fewer pictures.
Photos can be a memory, but they are like other material possessions: their meaning fades. A more probable way of learning from travel is to observe and allow those observations to seep into your mind and mingle with everything your mind has taken in before in the continual reassessment and evolution of intellect. And there was a lot to learn in Hemis. But the festival required concentrated watching; Buddhism’s lessons lie in its subtleties – the way, for example, the dances and acts are hilarious and comical to illustrate that enlightenment comes through the pursuit of joy (unlike the monotheistic religions that emphasis moribund fear and grave austerity), and the way some of dances were repetitive to the point of boredom (here, boredom was part of the point; a lesson in the logical twists of Buddhism). How could one learn these things scanning the surroundings with a camera?
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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