Friday 8 March           Tourists are banned from the back streets of Gion, Tokyo's geisha district, after residents complained about incessant and aggressive photographing of locals.
27 August 2021Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â The Afghan School of Music falls silent
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There were four people in the car plus the driver: myself, Damian the photographer, and two representatives of Medecins Sans Frontieres. We were heading through the Kinshasa traffic to see an AIDS project they were running in a poor district of the city. Damian had his camera in his lap. "Would it be okay to shoot some street scenes from the car?" he asked, lifting the camera up a bit. At that moment we slowed down in the traffic and, as luck would have it, a policeman standing on the kerb glanced in the car and spotted the camera. Immediately he gestured angrily and shouted something in Lingala. The driver's reaction was instantaneous. He yanked the wheel of the 4X4 hard right, squeezed through a gap between two VW Kombi vans (there were thousands of them on the streets of the Congolese capital in those days) and accelerated hard. A minute later, a Kombi van appeared alongside with the policeman clinging to the side with one hand, shaking the other at us, hand clenched into a fist.
"Get back to HQ," yelled the MSF guy. "Ring the Minister."
After a few minutes of engine-roaring near-misses and desperate 'through-the-gap' moments, we shot through the MSF gates and they shut behind us, just in time to keep the policeman out. We were, it seemed, at the beginning of a diplomatic incident.
What had happened? The policeman did not like having his photo taken, or to be more accurate, he did not like having an image-taking device anywhere near his person. He may also, it's true, have seen an opportunity for a small donation to his pension fund. He may also have seen a bubble of wealthy white men and recognised a chance to make small amends for egregious historical wrongs, including the lining up of 'interesting' tribal people and their 'capture' in a camera.
The question of image rights and consent was present from the very beginning of photography. It was 1838 and Parisian inventor, Louis Daguerre pointed a strange apparatus out the window above his Boulevard de Temple studio and released the shutter. The exposure was about four minutes and so the only human to cast a solid image was a gentleman having his shoes shined. If he had known where this was going, he might have rushed upstairs and hammered on Daguerre's door, demanding a copy of the photograph, or blood. He did not, he was probably too busy enjoying the broad tree-lined street without cars (Daguerre's colleague Nicéphore Niépce had already started dealing with that, inventing the first internal combustion engine). The shiny shoe man's name is unknown, but he became the first human in history to lose control over his image rights.
Even before Daguerre's invention, humanity had a tricky relationship with its own image. Islam and Judaism have always had strong elements of what is termed aniconism, while Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity have flirted with it. Go to any ancient church in Britain and you can find evidence for the destruction of images. At Blythburgh in Suffolk, legend has it that Cromwell's soldiers smashed every image they could get their hands on, but failing to reach the ceiling bosses that were carved into faces, they shot musket balls at them. They are still there, embedded. In Wells cathedral, they smashed some of the medieval stained glass: it was reconstructed into new, abstract patterns that I reckon is probably an improvement on the original.
Living in Yemen in the early 1990s I saw the power of aniconism in action. The renowned British painter Martin Yeoman was visiting and had bravely decided to set up his easel outside Bab al-Yemen, the main medieval gate to the Old City of Sana'a. I went to have a look and found Martin with a crowd of jostling, yelling art advisors, most of them under the age of consent, but also one old man who delivered a forearm smash to the painter. This severe critic objected to the very idea of making an image. On another occasion Martin was in a village on the stupendously beautiful mountain of Jabal Rayma where he was sketching a youth playing draughts. When the drawing was finished the youth came over to look. After expressing some pleasure in an image that truly caught his likeness, he leaned over, and with his hand, rubbed it out.
Back in Congo DRC, we eventually dared to leave the compound and made it to the AIDS project without incident. There, for the first time, I saw the distressing end-game for sufferers: physical and mental collapse. Many of the women had been abandoned by family and had young children, some with the virus lurking in their systems. I was covering this part of our trip for BBC World Service radio and started recording interviews. No one objected. Damian was struggling to get consent, expending vast amounts of diplomacy and persuasion to get each click of the shutter. The contrast with the voice was striking. Nobody minded at all. (Not that sound, especially music, has escaped the attention of puritanical minds. In Kabul in 2003, looking round the Ministry of Culture building that had been wrecked by the Taliban, I noticed they had singled out the grand piano for particularly harsh treatment: riddling it with bullets, then throwing it down the stairs.)
After leaving the Kinshasa AIDS project, Damian and I were walking down a road towards a market when he took a photo, a cityscape. Almost immediately a youth leapt from the long grass by some shacks, protesting loudly. In seconds we were surrounded by stick-brandishing young men, all shouting and furious, threatening to wrench Damian's camera from his hands and smash it. We kept smiling and walking. Their objections were territorial rather than religious. We were on their turf. Taking anything without asking was not allowed, not even images. When we turned into the market, we must have left their patch because they all gave up.
The market sold fruit and vegetables, but also wild meat. There were tiny crocodiles, still alive, their jaws strapped up with strips of tree bark; there were hunks of hippo and steaks of snake. And there were dried and smoked chimpanzees, their faces contorted into macabre final silent screams. No one here seemed to mind photography in the slightest. In fact, people started asking to have their picture taken, proudly holding up the grisly meat produce.
A week later I was at Kinshasa Airport, and found myself sitting next to the first and only tourist I had met in the entire trip. He was a Belgian student who, he admitted, had had a traumatic holiday. On the first day, somewhere outside the capital, he had been arrested for taking pictures and thrown in jail. It had taken the Belgian consul two weeks to get him out, by which time his holiday was over.
I have not visited Congo DRC since the rise of the smart phone so have no idea how it is coping with that innovation. The country, however, is behind the rise of that gadget. Thousands of poor miners, many children, dig out the cobalt needed for the batteries.
Years later scientists investigating the HIV-1 virus decided that it probably came from human-chimpanzee contact in the Kinshasa area, most likely an animal market.
I’m travelling next week. Back soon with another story. Check out Martin Yeoman’s work on his website https://www.martinyeomanartist.com/