June - July 2015

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PARTING SHOT
140 Jun-Jul15
Happy Snappers By Lara Weston
Ihave two very photogenic children,
aged three and five. They’re blonde
and brown-eyed, and have always
been a subject of fascination, especially
with mainland tourists. When our oldest
was a baby we had an “incident” outside
a shopping centre one afternoon. We
were sitting eating ice creams, minding
our own business when a man came up
beside our table, turned his back to us,
made rabbit ears with his fingers and
smiled as his wife took a photo of him
“with” my husband and son. We tried
waving them away but they just smiled
and kept snapping.
That’s when I snapped. I leapt up
from the table, shouting “No! No! NO!”
and shooed them away like I was Kim
Kardashian fending off paparazzi.
My husband laughed at me but I was
furious! When I thought about it later I
realised I may have overreacted slightly,
but it seemed so rude. It wasn’t so
much that they wanted a photo of an
adorable chubby, golden-haired boy, it
was the way in which we were treated
like exhibits at the zoo – photographed
without our permission – when we
just wanted to enjoy our ice-creams in
peace. Now I know how Kim feels!
Before our boys were born, people
used to take photos of our dog. One
year we took her to a festival and at one
stage we had such a crowd around us
we couldn’t move, as if she were a mini
canine celebrity. It wasn’t so much the
paparazzi that bothered me, it was not
knowing where those photos would
end up (not to mention the fact that I
never got to check the photos to make
sure they got us at a good angle). I had
visions of my dog ending up in a dog
food commercial in Beijing. For a while
there I was half expecting to see my sons
adorning a billboard advertising mobile
phone plans. I know now it’s more
likely that they’ll end up in a random
file on someone’s computer, never to
be seen again, but it’s always bothered
me slightly (and occasionally prompted
slightly irrational outbursts).
I’ve mellowed a little since that first
encounter. We’ve been mobbed at
Disneyland, with as many photos
taken of our two as Mickey and Minnie,
especially the time we went with friends
and their equally adorable, blonde
haired, blue-eyed children, and we didn’t
object when our annual family photo
shoot was interrupted by a group of
tourists who stopped to take photos of
us being photographed…
The one consolation for me is that,
after five years of attempting to take
photos of the boys myself, I know how
difficult it is to get them to stand still for
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long enough to capture the cuteness.
These days, I stand back and count
to three as would-be snappers pull out
their cameras and I’m rewarded as the
boys run in the opposite direction at
the first sign of a flash. Now I’m certain
that rather than ending up on billboards
there are hundreds of blurry photos of
the backs of my boy’s heads in iPhoto
Trash folders around the world. And I
wonder what I ever worried about.