Pixiport:The Voice Behind The Lens Michael Dubiner: "IS CHILD ABUSE RELATIVE?
And if it is, should it be?


The Voice Behnd The Lens
Writings on Photography and Beyond.
With writer, street, documentary photographer Michael Dubiner.


The little girl was sweet. She was with her mother near one of the few tourist bars in the Old City of Havana. I was alone, waiting for my companion so we could go into this 'don't miss' tourist trap of a bar that Hemingway purportedly drank at that turned out to be just fine. Standing outside, my camera hanging from my neck, I looked as if I were a rich foreigner, which in relative terms, I was.
The little girl motioned to me, as if to say: 'take my picture-please.' I did not want to do it. It was a waste of time. This is not my style of photography. I go for street images that are taken surreptitiously and are unposed. However, I accommodated her as she leaned against the side of the bar snapping her image As I said thank you and was turning around to leave, she reached out for me and gave me a warm strong embrace. Then her mother, mostly in Spanish but with enough English thrown in so I could understand, asked me for money for milk for the child. She got her money, just as I had gotten the picture of the child that I did not want to take. It was weird and I never thought of the incident again.
Not until much later did I even print this image. On my first review of the Havana pictures I did not want to waste very limited production time on marginal or bad images. Later, the digital contact of the image caught my eye, not as an image, but as a story. This girl's sophistication, as seen by her pose, her smile, coupled with the incident I just related started me thinking that this mother was prostituting her daughter. What lessons was the child goin"