Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Photo Opportunities

Most of the tour group have now gone back to Singapore, leaving Noi, myself and good chums Rohanna and Osman as we extended our stay for three days. With my back almost fully functional, and the valium I'm on having afforded me the best night's sleep I can remember in years - probably since being a child - we set out on a day trip to the rather lovely town of Segovia just 70 kilometres out of Madrid today.

Once there it proved impossible to look in any direction without wanting to point a camera there. I've noticed that the rather snobbish way of looking at people wanting to take pictures of everything was to claim that in doing so they were somehow missing the living reality of the experience. Like most clever ideas implying a kind of intellectual superiority on the part of those who somehow 'know better' this is profoundly wrong. What you see in people dying to take pictures of beautiful things is a simple profound recognition of that beauty and the need to savour the moment as a way of seeing. This is even more obvious now when the ease with which pictures can be taken means you get to see the least likely characters taking shots of the least likely scenes. 

This is all part of what I consider the democratisation of art - and a jolly good thing it is too.

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