Looking at the most viewed photos in my Flickr account, I discovered something disturbing — the top photo is one I took on the Mekong in Laos entitled “What’s a boat trip down the Mekong without some naked kids?”. Going through any waterways in South East Asia you see many families washing themselves in various stages of nakedness — it’s part of the cultural experience. I posted this photo to illustrate this, yet I’m in two minds now about keeping the title (or the photo in general) due to the obvious fact that people are finding this based on the search string ‘naked kids’. It’s not wildly popular (82 views since February 2006 to now), but nonetheless it’s a worry.
Looking into the problem with posting pictures of children onto Flickr further, I discovered a discussion on the Flickr group “Little People”. The group is a fairly innocent group about “kids, younguns, children, babies, youth, faces of the future”. However the discussion I found, as well as many other group discussions, were about blocking Flickr members and the general alarm other members felt when random strangers added photos of their kids as favourites. It’s a real shame that people wanting to share the joy of their kids with the world have to constantly watch out that their kids photos aren’t being misused. But, I guess that’s also just a general and important responsibility of parenting.
Going back to the topic of photographing kids in Asia, I always felt very uncomfortable doing this, especially as a white male. There are some amazing kids around Asia with so much personality that you can’t help but photograph many of them. I found another set on Flickr with pictures from Laos, and some far more provocative photos of kids playing in the river. By provocative I mean close detail of the kids — the photographer was merely documenting the kids the same way I was. But the photographer here was female, and this is another interesting thing I picked up on while travelling — and that is that for women to take photos of kids is rarely noticed, yet with men its very different. Often I would be with other female travellers taking photos of cute kids playing or trying to sell things, and while they would snap some terrific photos, I always felt very cautious about doing so, in case someone misjudged my intentions.
Unfortunately I don’t think things here will really change. Of course men aren’t the only ones who are sexual predators, but the vast majority are, and everyone knows the appalling situation with child exploitation in Asia. So next time I’m on holiday and we see a bunch of kids splashing water or jumping off water buffalo, I might just pass the camera to my girlfriend — and make sure that ‘naked kids’ don’t appear in the title on Flickr.