This image feels appropriate for a week where much of the world is shut down.

I made this image in Mumbai in February of 2019. This street approaches a temple. As I was photographing, a random person accosts me telling me I can not photograph there. There were signs up saying the temple can not be photographed but I’m at least half of a block from the temple and this part of the street is absolutely not the temple. Random person is yelling about how he’s going to call the police. I point out to him that signs say no photographs of the temple and this is no the temple. Rando insists photographs of the “temple area” are prohibited and I must delete my photographs. I have no doubt his claim about the temple area is completely and utterly false. But to get him to go away I delete the photographs. Cameras use descendent of the ancient FAT filesystem from the DOS days on their memory cards so it’s easy to undelete stuff if you haven’t written more images so I undelete the images later. In the US, I would have yelled back at this idiot to call cops so I could ask them to arrest him from wasting the police’s time since I know aside from national security installations, it legal to photograph anything thanks to the 1st amendment but in foreign countries, I try to avoid unnecessary run-ins with the police.

India, Travel

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