“View –>”
It’s hard to avoid being told when and where to look and what to photograph when you’re a tourist. Why I should photograph the Roman columns of Jerash soaring above me at the most extreme angle (achieved by lying on one’s back beneath them and pointing the camera upward) or why I should “walk like an Egyptian” in front of the Great Pyramid is beyond me. Why we all take those silly photos of each other holding up or smashing between our fingers various buildings or places of historical interest, or simply standing in front of them, possessing them proudly, donning our fanny packs and floppy sun hats like conquerors – I’ll never fully understand. Sure, there were plenty of those shots in Petra, the “rose-red city half as old as time” in Southern Jordan, and inevitably they are now living in my camera. I can search “Petra” on Google images and find every single one of them.
Perhaps the most superfluous of photographic suggestions came after trekking a couple hours through the city, up approximately 800 stone “steps” to the Monastery and beyond to the mountaintops above it was this one:
It’s hard to avoid being told when and where to look and what to photograph when you’re a tourist. Why I should photograph the Roman columns of Jerash soaring above me at the most extreme angle (achieved by lying on one’s back beneath them and pointing the camera upward) or why I should “walk like an Egyptian” in front of the Great Pyramid is beyond me. Why we all take those silly photos of each other holding up or smashing between our fingers various buildings or places of historical interest, or simply standing in front of them, possessing them proudly, donning our fanny packs and floppy sun hats like conquerors – I’ll never fully understand. Sure, there were plenty of those shots in Petra, the “rose-red city half as old as time” in Southern Jordan, and inevitably they are now living in my camera. I can search “Petra” on Google images and find every single one of them.
Perhaps the most superfluous of photographic suggestions came after trekking a couple hours through the city, up approximately 800 stone “steps” to the Monastery and beyond to the mountaintops above it was this one:
And boy, was it a view.
You won’t find Petra in this photo. It’s far behind me, far below, somewhere back there with Indiana Jones. Here I looked not to a travel book or a tour guide, but to these barren, perilous cliffs and their ancient sacrificial high places - to the wilderness before me to read there about the history behind me. If you want the kind of history you can read about in a textbook, then look up Wikipedia’s entry (or some other encyclopedic source). History is not set in stone, not even in Petra: we can clamber over it, breathe it in, examine it – experience the environment from which it comes – for ourselves.
1 comment:
That is a beautiful view, and a beautiful description of it. And the sign is terrific.
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