Lot of weird statements and emotions in this thread, such as someone being creepy because he keeps his Leica under his jacket and takes it out to take a picture. I'll just deal with the following...
yet one more reason to live in Asia.
...which also strikes me as weird, not only terms of being stated as a reason to live in Asia but also considering that Asia is a big place with hugely differently cultures. Last week I went to three towns in the Shan State in Burma: Tachilek, Chiang Tung (Kentong) and Myang La (Mongla), as related
in this thread.
The reactions to my taking pictures in these three towns were different. In Tachilek, which on the border across the river from Mae Sai in Thailand, the reactions were the same as in Thailand: people don't mind being photographed in the street, although some will look conscious of being photographed because they are thinking, "why is he photographing me, he's not my relative, he doesn't even know me, what's so special about the way I look?" Because many Western tourists cross over from Thailand to Tachilek for a few hours, the people are used to seeing Westerners and it's understandable that the reactions are similar to Thailand.
In Chiang Tung, people are even more open to being photographed, not even exhibiting surprise that they are being photographed. They will just go on doing what they were doing, unless you smile at them and then they will smile back. As so few people speak English, and as there have seen very few Western tourists, they don't try to communicate with the photographer. Now, the Shan speak a language similar to Northern Thai dialects and, in Chiang Tung, understand standard Thai because most of them have access to Thai television and pick up the language watching interminable Thai soap operas. Since I speak Thai, I could communicate with them and they are uniformly friendly, and still don't mind being photographed.
In Myang La, which is an autonomous region in the north of the Shan State on the Chinese border, established by a former Chinese Shan drug lord, which has its own laws and its own army, and which uses the Chinese yuan currency, the tourism comes from China and, now, a trickle from Thailand; but there have been very few western visitors. In this town, except for the bustling market, where people large don't notice or don't react to being photographed, people generally turn their face and put their forearm in front of it when you try to photograph them. The funny thing is that in the countryside to the north and south of Chiang Tung people have exactly the same reaction. When I put my camera up to photograph two beautiful young women having lunch with a man, they turned away and put up their forearms. Then, when I spoke to them in Thai asking if they didn't like being photographed, they answered that they weren't beautiful enough.
The point of all this is that you cannot generalize about Asia when you get such different reactions to being photographed from people, and when these different reactions are uniform within discrete areas close to each other.
—Mitch/Chiang Mai
Chiang Tung Days [direct download link for pdf file for book project]
