(no subject)

This is a giant photo post, filled with photos from my summer trips. I actually held off posting them because I feel like some of the photos from Cameroon and from Canada can be read as National Geographic-ish and that makes me intensely uncomfortable. But I am going to post all of them and by way of prolegomenon here is a gchat excerpt from last night (with apropos, natch)

me: so ihave these photos from Cameroon of these kids that really wanted their photos taken but they look uncomfortably like NG Africa photos. I guess if you take photos of kids in an African village on some level they will just look like that
apropos: yes
me: but what to do about it? how to make them not look like that?
apropos: you are not going to frame them in a NG way. hopefully.
me: how can I frame them except these kids really wanted their pics taken? I just wanted to put them on lj. I used a couple of photos from the villages in my workshop writeup [for my grant proposal] but not of kids, just of the community meeting
me I have actually lots of really cool photos from this powwow I went to in Canada because the family that invited me asked me to take pics of their kids and send them to them but they also look NG because all "native" photos in costume look NG that's like the dominant referent of the visual semioric
apropos: i think you can't do much about that semiotic except be clear about the context of the photo's production
me: yeah...
apropos: it is Bigger Than Us
me you know I actually found that taking pictures of kids is something nice I can do for people I visit
apropos: true
me not as like "exotic kids": but as in I am a pretty good children's photographer and can make nice photos for them for free and people are super into it...

So; in reverse chronological order:



( more Cameroon )

Now onto a totally different part of the world, the Canadian North, namely the North of Alberta, the home of the Athabasca tar sands, and the massive oil and mining operations.



( welcome to Alberta )

Summer is Pow-wow season there, people go from Pow-wow to Pow-wow competing in the dance competitions and visiting friends and relatives. I missed the one in Beaver Lake due to logistics/poor planning/unsuccessful hitchhiking, but Elaine, the sister of the Nation's chief, and an absolutley lovely woman who took me under her wing while I was there, invited me to the neighboring one in Heart Lake. She and her niece, Crystal, asked me to take photos of their kids, which I did, in addition to the photos I took when basically everyone was already dressed up.

( At the Pow-wows it is very clearly marked when it is okay to take photos, and when it is not. Obviously all of these were taken during the allowed period )

And, finally, these next pictures are subpar in quality, since my camera was stolen in Ecuador, but below the cut are the few cell phone images I have from there

( La Zona de Intag )