Stroud Is All Over the Place: Photography and Culture

Sunday, June 21, 2020

Photography and Culture

A French woman shopping

Photography and Culture

Living and traveling in Europe opened my eyes to photography, and my simple mind, not only to new experiences, but to different cultures. What the natives may have found ordinary, I found extraordinary and exciting. That included not only the objects and places that are magnets for tourists, but the everyday life of the people and how they lived.

For one thing, unlike the ripped clothes and flip-flops, in a style that I term homeless chic, the Europeans dress much more nicely. Both women and men care how they look. In Paris, a friend and I strolled past a group of seven or eight young men, sipping wine and chatting. My friend whispered, “All of them could have been straight out of GQ!” She was spot on.

The Italians can’t talk with their hands in their pockets. The French tend not to smile, but drink lots of wine. Doesn’t mean they’re not polite. While shopping for cheese and vegetables and sausages in a large market in Metz, France, I regretfully left my cheese purchase behind on the counter. Several lengthy corridors connected the vast market, each corridor lined with booths. After I’d strolled perhaps a hundred yards, stopping to shop along the way, a woman came running up to me with my package of carefully wrapped cheese. “Monsieur, perhaps you have forgotten this.” She said it very politely, but without ever breaking a smile.

Until you get to know them, Germans are as formally correct as bankers who don’t want to loan you money, and prefer quart sized glass mugs of beer. Southern Europeans kiss and hug a lot, even meeting casually. Germans and the English, never. It simply is not done.

But some things the Europeans have in common. In every country in Europe, dining is taken seriously and the wait staff is always correctly and properly trained. They are polite and efficient, but understand you didn’t come in their restaurant to make a best friend for life.

Socially, not very often do you see people sitting together glued to their mobile phones. Although I did see a young couple in an elegant café in London doing just that. They weren’t dressed that well either. My first thought was, “They must be Americans.”

Europeans converse. Meals are not mere acts of plunging food into their open maws, with each bite large enough to feed a family of four. Meals are opportunities to socially engage.

Yes, you can find all that in America, but from what I’ve seen it’s much more rare. Can you imagine holding a dinner party where the women all wear dresses and the men wear sports coats? Alas, we Americans have fallen into the depths of inelegance and worship at the temples of raggedy clothes and super-sized fast food.

So, yes, I found Europe excitingly different and grew to love meeting friends for wine in quaint cafés where conversation was the object and no one would be caught dead in flip-flops.

I hope my array of black and white photos allow you to see what I saw.