Hello everyone,
today I wanted to tell you a story of a fisherman picture that I took last weekend and it seems to have caused a lot of controversial feelings among my followers.
Three girls, two friends of mine and I, decided to go on a Saturday morning photo walk with a challenge to shoot with our film cameras. I had black and white film loaded in mine, so I was looking for punchy contrasts and interesting scenes that would look good devoid of colour. For my choice of film, the weather wasn’t great cause it was overcast, but we didn’t get completely cooked thanks to the cloud coverage.
We saw a few interesting scenes, but nothing really exciting until one point, we were passing by a shack where the fishermen just returned from their fishing trip of the day, and they were cleaning the nets and listening to some funky music.
I asked them if it was okay for us to take a few shots of them, and they seemed to be cool with that, so we started shooting them with our three film cameras.
The guys seemed to be quite happy to have the company of 3 girls (and some taxi drivers also stopped on the way to salute them and us). I took a few iPhone pictures among which was this image:
I took my last shot on the roll of film, rewind it and I already packed my camera when this guy in the “Adidas” pants stood up to hug his friend as that one was quite shy for posing in front of us. It felt like it was quite a cute moment, and when you live in the Middle East for long enough, you always see these guys hugging or holding hands, so it is completely a normal thing in their culture. But as I posted this image on my Instagram story I received a few replies from guys saying that it was wrong, it’s weird and it even looks like rape…
The story that I saw with my own eyes looked like something else in the eyes of my followers… and I am not going to judge anyone, and say that they were wrong to perceive it the way they saw it… but it made me stop and think for a second, how many times people saw something on my social media and they didn’t say a word, but this time it actually made them stop and write something? In the end, even this kind of reaction is better than silence, right?
Is it wrong for a man to hug another man from behind? Is it wrong to take pictures of that? Is it cute or is it disgusting? Everyone sees it differently and nobody is right or wrong, I suppose.
I’d rather have more love than hate in my life, so I am sharing a story of brotherhood, friendship, support and love. And you are free to see it any way you prefer.
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