What my friends in Uganda want in a photo of me is a suit looking business like. What I like in a photo of me is a snapshot, informally me. There are other conventions that are different, but like most culturally embedded ideas we operate unconsciously about them. There are real ethical issues involved in photographs. Some of the violence entails ignorance of social conventions. It takes sensitivity and the realization that we may not be as adept at reading photos as we presume to minimize the violence.

And Koranteng’s blog is great; new grist for the reader.

Ethics and sensitivity seem different issues, but I’m not at all clear how to disentangle them in re the issues of photograph, music and tourism. I’m not any clearer for reading your post or the great links in it, but am very glad to have read them.

Another post that popped into my mind, and seems almost as off topic as the funeral home story, is Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah’s Cultural Sensitivity in Technology. This is the bit I was thinking of:

“I find endlessly fascinating this notion that cultural sensitivity in technology sometimes necessitates algorithmic adaptation. Maybe though, iterative adaptation in response to local environments – evolution in short, is the name of the game. Perhaps that’s simply the way things should be.”

Do you share photos with Tanzanian friends? I’m fascinated sharing photos with a couple of long time online friends from Uganda. We read and expect different things from photos. What those differences “are” isn’t something easily explained.

I loved Scrubs in the early days, back when the main characters were in that lovely position of having massive responsibility without real expertise, and people’s lives in the balance. That sense of real gravitas gave the ridiculous humor a particular poignancy that I feel like they lost once they became real doctors.

Though I don’t think you should blame an actor for a bad film–it is usually the director’s fault. (And I also love scrubs.)

Thanks for posting this.