John’s own opinion on Klara and Edda Belly Dancing Photo

The “Klara and Edda Belly Dancing Photo” has certainly got mixed views from the public, with many parents finding the photo extremely offensive and other people seeing it as “just art”.

This is one interesting angle from John who looks at “this so called piece of art” in a photography angle.

John said:
This news article and the whole debate around the ‘offending’ item drew my curiosity to search the internet for a picture I had, hitherto, never heard of.

Basically, I wanted to be informed so that I could form my own opinion on whether all the fuss was justified. That aside, as a very proud father of twin girls, aged 6 I thought I’d be as qualified as anyone in offering an educated opinion as to whether the picture was indeed offensive.

That said, once viewed, my dilemma with regards picture took a rather unexpected turn.

Did Elton John actually pay money to own this item? If he did, I think he would have been well advised to spend a little more time looking through a few more family albums before making his final choice!

In a new age of digital photography, all us parent-types are taking literally thousands of kiddie snaps every year… around the house, in the park, first day at school, 117th trip on a bus on a Thursday in September, the list goes on and on as our photo opportunities are now only limited by the size of our CF Cards! In this world of free and easy, no risk snapping though, some (most?) pictures are inevitably so bad, so immediately obviously a case of bad timing, bad position and/or bad thought process that they’re dismissed to the waste bin as quickly as our fat little fingers can press ‘Delete’, ‘Confirm’ on the back of the camera.

I think you can see where this is going.

Had I taken this picture… this so called piece of art… there is absolutely no way on earth, not even with the brightest sunlight impeding the view of my 3″ LCD screen, that this picture would ever… EVER… have survived this first stage of culling.

The lighting is atrocious; the angle is appalling, the background truly uninspiring and the content fails in every aspect. It is not endearing, heart warming, informative or special.

There is nothing in this picture at all, nothing, that would speak to me as a parent, telling me that this was worthy of that elite 5% that survive every stage of review/deletion that us Daddy/David Bailey types now stringently put all our photos through.

So I fail to see how a picture that would never make it into anyone’s family album has yet, somehow, managed to find its way on to the world stage, labelled as ‘art’!? Quite frankly, if this picture is art worthy of payment then I’m in possession of a private library full of Mona Lisa’s!

To me this isn’t art, it’s just a really poor photo that 99,999 out of 100,000 of us would have just deleted from their Canon Ixus 500s within seconds of it having been taken.

I cannot comprehend how it has come to be regarded as art and I cannot comprehend why somebody would want this picture in their ‘collection’ as I fail to see what pleasure can be drawn from viewing it. That is not a suggestion that it is offensive, just that, to me, it has been elevated to an unjustifiable status and I personally therefore wonder what part its content and which elements of society that appeals to have had to play in this.

Join the discussion here on the Klara and Edda Belly Dancing Photo.