Boyfriend Duty 1

19 January 2022

When I look at random through old files that I haven't yet posted sometimes a theme or two seem to emerge: one such theme serves as the subject of this and the next couple of posts. 

Of course it's not only women who serve as the photographic subjects for their significant others (or, in the case of what's called "Instagram Boyfriends", compel their boyfriends to capture them for their social media accounts), but it seems from what I've witnessed that when males compel their female partners to capture them the situation is rarely so picturesque--not least of all, because males often like to be photographed "in action." 

Like the time my son and I had to wait to cross a small bridge in San Polo while an American male in his 20s clambered onto the small bridge's low concrete parapet and, after making sure his girlfriend was prepared with the camera, leapt down to be caught in mid-air.  

It was the kind of leap my son used to like to make off an unused outdoor stage in Lido into the sand below when he was 4 years old. It never occurred to him either at that age, or at any point afterwards, that it was something one might do in the city of Venice. (Nor did it occur to him at the age of four to ask us to photograph him in flight.) 

But one thing I noticed in more than a decade of living full-time in Venice is that it seems that the beauty of the city, and all the signs of its long history, are simply too much for some visitors to bear. Perhaps feeling insignificant in comparison to so much culture and history--and apparently without an educational or auto-didactical history that would allow them to make any sense of it--they assert themselves through sheer physicality.