Teresa Derr, 134 YinD
A few years ago, when I was living in Morocco, I was visiting a city that had relatively recently shot to the top ten list of cities to visit. My mom and sister were visiting me, so we were playing the tourist and not the resident I usually tried to imitate, and my sister is a brilliant photographer. She has a fancy camera, knows how to work it, has gotten paid for her photos – the whole deal.
I am not a photographer in the slightest. I can barely work the camera on my phone. But when my sister needs her hands free for a few minutes, I know enough to at least put the strap around my neck and hold it so it doesn’t fall. But occasionally, holding it like that makes it look like I know what I’m doing. And in this instance, one of the residents of the city certainly thought so. A local older woman carrying her groceries saw me standing outside a shop waiting for my sister, a fancy camera around my neck, and immediately started to shout at me:
“No photos!” She yelled at me. “Do not take pictures of me!” She walked a little bit further down the street away from me and turned around to make sure I wasn’t trying to snap a sneak pic. “I mean it! No pictures!”
I’ll be honest, at the time, it was jarring, rude, and upset me a little bit. I’m a very conflict-avoidant person who enjoys making friends with locals, and to be yelled at for no reason over a misunderstanding put me in a bit of a funk. I thought she must have had a bad experience with tourists in the past, treating her like something exotic to capture on film, but I was different, obviously! She didn’t need to assume that I would do that to her.
Now, I completely understand where she was coming from. Honestly, some days I daydream about being that woman. Oh, to be able to yell at the people with their cameras, “No photos! No photos!”
Thai people love taking photos of/with me. Now, there are some times when I don’t mind being in a picture. In the beginning, anytime I was asked it was fine. When I’m with my host sister and she’s taking photos of: herself, her food, and me, it feels more like I’m being treated like a friend and included in her hobbies. When I’m with my students and they want to take selfies with me, it makes me feel like a cool person, one they don’t mind being seen with and putting on their Instagram. But when I’m with many of the older people at site, I often feel like a prop for photos.
People grab me by the arm, saying, “ถ่ายรูป! ถ่ายรูป!” (‘Taai ruup’ – take a photo). People who’ve heard about me will come to the schools where I work to request a photo with me from my counterpart teachers. School directors will drag me around at official functions to show the other directors their ‘kru farang’ – foreign teacher, and then everyone there wants a picture with me. It’s exhausting, weird, and frankly, uncomfortable. I’ve been at site for over six months now. I want to be old news. I want to be a regular community member. I don’t want to be a photo prop anymore.
It was especially frequent in October, which happened to be “Retirement Party Season”. My host mom was one of the people retiring, so we went to all the events for her (which were: four, 6-hour parties over two weeks). I wore traditional clothes, because that was the dress code for these parties, and I couldn’t go ten minutes without being asked to stand for a picture. Even those who didn’t ask for a picture told me that I was especially beautiful that day because I was wearing a Thai outfit. It got old fast.
I am not the only one to get treated like a photo prop. At the Retirement Parties, many teachers dressed up in traditional outfits to have a fancy procession to bring the retirees to the ceremony. Everyone took photos of them, too. During the Morlam singing and dancing, I watched people treat the performers – especially the women in the sparkly, bedazzled leotards – as cardboard cutouts, even more than they do me. They pressed themselves up against the women and sang along until someone dragged them away.
At least I feel I do have the option to say no, to yell at anyone who approaches me, “No pictures!” (and, more importantly, “No touching!”). And I know that should I ask, the people in my site would happily defend me from opportunistic photo seekers. Perhaps the fact that I haven’t already is more a sign of my conflict-avoidant tendencies. So long as it remains harmless, with old people wanting to remember the day they met a foreigner, I’ll probably continue to swallow down my complaints, paste a smile on, and fondly remember the old lady in Morocco shouting, “No photos!”
Sticky Rice 
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