I have to confess that this week’s Photo Friday theme – Foreign – has caused me some problems.
Foreign is a simple enough word, but when I came to think about how I might interpret it photographically, I got stuck. Foreign to who? To me? I live in a predominantly Asian area of our town so I could have gone down to our local shops and taken pictures of Okra, or Asian dress materials in the local shop, or any number of other cultural items ‘foreign’ to me. But, for some reason, that didn’t appeal. Part of the problem is to do with multiculturalism, i.e. these are people who live here – they aren’t, in some important way, foreign to me. Yet this isn’t to do with political correctness, rather it’s more to do with me not being able to get my head straight about what the term means in this context.
Anyway, I decided to take a different tack altogether. The picture I’ve used was taken when our youngest daughter was 26 days old. And while it may seem slightly odd to consider a baby ‘foreign’ I do think there’s something quite extraordinary about their emergence (for want of a better term). Now she’s ten months old she seems perfectly a part of the world, but in those first few weeks (as with our other daughters) she did seem quite other-worldly ... almost foreign.
