Opposite ends of life #2
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
The original post Opposite Ends of Life, in La Antigua Guatemala DP, was published on May 23rd, 2006 and it was about a little girl and an old lady helping each other cross the street. It is an interesting shot, if I may say so, you should see if you haven’t done so already.
Today’s entry is about different women and their opposite position in the spectrum of life.
On the left, we have a young woman, tourist, disinhibited, sunbathing in a bench at Central Park. As Ian McEwan says, the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws created a better future for this young woman by locating her birth place somewhere in Europe or North America, with access to better education and the possibility of middle or upper-middle class family with enough buying power to pay for trips abroad. I believe the reading of the picture can give us an even deeper hindsight into her background.
On the right, three young indigenous women stroll with their very conservative hand-woven dresses, probably looking for customers to whom they could sell their handicrafts. The same randomness and chaos in the universe set these young Guatemalan women in the cradle of a poor family in a poor country with almost no access to education, certainly with no access to travels abroad.
The French have a saying for this: C’est la vie!, that is life or like the Spanish song goes Así es la vida de caprichosa…
What is your reading of the photograph above? What sort of story can you invent for the scene above?
