This text serves two purposes that have been linked in recent events. It aims to answer some assumptions I hear here and there about tango photography, secondly it aims to clarify some words that somebody spread about me after insulting me and stealing or supporting the stealing of photographs that I took and edited.
It may have redundancies with "When tango photography is taken for granted" (2016); I don’t think that I will check in details.
This is mostly "extensive spontaneous text as it comes". I didn’t try to shorten it and didn’t work the structure too much. I don’t know if this makes it more honest, more straightforward, more powerful or just less readable but I didn’t want it to look like a dictionary and this fits better to the mind-set I’m into while writing at this moment… to let words take total freedom.
Contents
Recently, I had a serious incident with somebody which originated from a misuse of one of my photos (which was quite popular) followed by very poor reactions by two involved people. The photograph was used without my agreement, without credits, was re-uploaded to Facebook in very poor quality… and last but not least… by people who apparently make big money out of tango.
It was used as an illustration to an interview which first question ask "What is tiring you in tango?". When I first saw it, I wasn't in a combative mood at all, I replied ironically in a Facebook comment that one thing that is tiring me in tango is "when people use my pictures and cut the credits, without asking me anything, especially to do such a poor graphical work from it (talking about the Facebook re-upload)" (not pointing at anybody precisely). At that point I wasn't even really claiming anything and I thought I would leave the whole thing there. The publisher then started attacking me in the comments before even understanding that he was using one of my pictures... Later he contacted me rather nervously in private messages.
Then, the story can compare to that famous story in photography which happened to photographer Rohan Anderson: "Band Responds in the Worst Way Possible After Stealing Photographer’s Work"
Some things that differed from Rohan Anderson's story were that the insults were far more personal. The publisher, who is a "professional" photographer, told me that he had the right to use my photograph because of the fact that he is a "professional" photographer and hates "non-professional" photographers, and because the photographee1 doesn't like me. The photographee first didn't want to be part of the discussion and given the way the publisher had treated me, the only thing I saw then was to ask them compensation money for the use of the picture. Then the photographee who was not supposed to contact me again on the topic sent me a message in defence of that rude guy and speaking in the name of so-called "tango community" with words that read like the views of some totalitarian tango-elite... About things like people who "have the right to be in milongas" and people who should not. And yet in some circles of the Brussels tango crowd in 2017, such a behaviour finds support.
It's funny to observe how some people may refer to the "tango community" when it suits their goals but will deny its existence when it doesn't... In my opinion there is no such thing has a "tango community", just people sharing a common interest/spare time activity/passion and some being more friendly than others.
More recently, I needed to tell something else to that second person, because I had some new information which I thought could clear out some important misunderstanding and cut some wrong rumours. I expected the he/she would have calmed down since then, but his/her reaction was just as wrong as the previous one.
Somebody with whom any communication backfires is somebody who is denying my most basic rights on my works that they could use… In addition, I don’t want to offer anything to that kind of person; hence I took down all of my photos of him/her and explicitly forbid him/her and the initial nervous publisher from using any of my works.
I’m not going to name him/her here or go further into details about that specific story as I don’t want it to become a personally targeted worldwide rant. I just hope that some people who heard this story can now get it right. I’ll just add that what I feel is hurt and disappointment, not anger, that I feel like I need to keep a defensive stance about it. Yet, this story made me feel like it’s the right time for a massive "tango photography" assumption debunking.
Following that incident, I had a long and rather appeasing (though only scratching the surface of the problems) conversation with one of that second person’s good friends (thanks to her). Some things she said made me realize how weird it is that we (I mean people in general) may agree on so many things and yet get into conflicts anyways... maybe because some people want or need conflict, or need to reduce other people to oversimplified schemes so that it is more simple to point at who is good and who is bad. This conversation held many things that I may agree with, at least to some degree, and points of view that I can understand, but it also contained some assumptions that I hear here and there and that could be summarized this way (and I insist on the fact that this will be a synthesis of the ideas that I would like to reply to and that I am not criticising the person who I talked with): “You, tango photographers, you use our pictures for your own benefits without giving us a choice, hence we have the right to use your works and you should not try to protect them when they get stolen. All you should think about is sharing photography as a gift and enjoy when your work is being seen even if your name is not on it and you don’t get famous. And it’s only tango and photography so it should not be taken seriously.”
And indeed, that’s our first motivation, sharing photography as some kind of art/creation and gift, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing tango photography at all… I will come back to it. Yet, at least from my point of view, problems don’t come from fame and rarely from money (depending on what you are doing) but from failure to show minimum respect and fulfil the most basic rights of people who did works for you.
A first thing that I want to dismiss is the assumption that you are not given a choice, which, to me, links to potential privacy issues.
I can hear that from newcomers who haven’t seen the cameras yet, but certainly not from those who have regularly seen, liked, commented, shared, potentially made other uses of our photographs for years and never asked for a stop.
If you have followed everything these last years (and I don’t expect that anybody has been able to do that) I have proposed tools to try to tackle privacy issues that tango photography may imply simply because it’s impossible to go to a milonga and ask every single person if they want to be portrayed or not (unless something gets done at milongas entrances).
Things that you should be able to do with any photographer: First, you may ask me not to be portrayed, for a limited time or permanently. I’ve always accepted this simple request and I usually don’t need to know why you are asking it (unless it seems to be something personal about me which would probably be for a wrong reason). The second thing you can do is ask for some pictures to be removed after publishing. (To that end, regarding Facebook, I recommend that you allow tags but also activate filtering on your Facebook tags so that, if somebody tags pictures of you, you get notified and may dismiss them before they get to your profile and/or ask for them to be removed. If you don’t allow tags at all, you may have some other issue which is that you would not be aware when there are photographs of you.)
By the way you may ask a photographer to send you photos in private but since managing individual requests can be a lot of extra work outside of our regular workflows, I guess that most photographers rarely do it. For that reason, personally, I may send photos I already have but then I won't include that person in my shootings anymore.
Other tools or solutions I personally work on: In 2014, when I started tango photography I used to ask to at least one person on each photograph I pre-selected to tell me whether it should be published or not. the problem with this approach was that it took the equivalent of an extra full time job and could keep some works on hold for weeks due to persons postponing answers or not replying at all. Also, some other photographers advised against it, and I realise that now it would be even more costly to include this in a workflow that already got more complex. In 2015, I created website https://tangography.net/ (which doesn’t exist anymore). It took approximately one month of evening programming. https://tangography.net/ was a semi-private homemade PHP website where I intended to publish my tango photos and would have focused on giving the photographees1 as much control as possible on what can get done with their picture, which would have included restrictions of use and of display but also features to push their photos to Facebook and possibly other networks themselves. I also considered opening it to other photographers when it would more mature but hosting costs and hosting scalability might have been obstacles. I dropped https://tangography.net/ after a few months as it was missing its target as shared links weren't shown in Facebook’s feed and even disappeared from my Facebook page's timeline after some time, and people didn’t want to register on another site. And I mean, although a few complimented this initiative, even people who wished for an alternative way of publishing photos because of privacy or ideological concerns didn’t take part in it and asked me to bring back my photography to Facebook because "it’s easier". Some peole who claimed that they didn't trust Facebook didn't want to trust my fully handcrafted website either. That's why after some time, I took pictures back to Facebook. More recently, I considered some ways to actually ask for people’s agreement or disagreement regarding photos at milongas entrances, but I was told that it would be complex, and indeed that’s true, and only the organisers who control the entrances are potentially in position to fully achieve that. (Though, I have heard that this exists in Germany.)
I'm still thinking about some forms of changes or solutions some times but I don't see anything new for now.
Ultimately, I do photos for those who like it and have always tried not to bother those who don’t like it. So, please, stop saying that I’m not giving you a choice when all you have to do is ask, when I have the same issue as any similar tango photographers, and yet I have done extra efforts to try to find solutions. Including building some privacy focused system, which could potentially have become the ultimate privacy-respecting publishing tool in tango or in events in general, but people asked for the opposite.
A second topic I want to dismiss is the fact that we get benefit from your image.
One misconception is that I may sell pictures to make money from your image. While I may sometimes sell pictures, if somebody who is not on that picture wants to buy a picture of you, I will contact you first to ask you for your agreement and usually offer you a share of the profit (though I have no obligation to offer you money). If you disagree or if I cannot contact you, I won’t sell.
Even if we sometimes get paid, which is highly deserved given the investment in time and money required by quality photography, if in addition to sharing photography as some gift we are promoting anything, it may be events of which we usually are not the organisers, and the gift of photography itself (extra work) which already costs us money.
I guess if I was not considering casual gains as a fair compensation and if I really was after money, I don't think that I would publish photos of the quality I use to publish on Facebook... Instead I would have a website where you could only see reduced photographs and buy full size using your credit card or PayPal or so.
Anyway, I think it's a pity that we live in such a culture that, whenever you potentially make small gain, you are often brought to justify yourself and feel guilty, and even more when you also offered something for free, while others are making thousands and possibly millions and everybody eats out of their hand, no questions asked.
I can, to some extent, imagine a world without money but we don't live in such a world.
We’re not doing it for money or to smuggle your image.
We're not doing it for money... Are we doing it for fame?
Well, fame in tango *coughing*… If I wanted to make views on YouTube I would make videos about… I don’t know… what makes views? Guitar covers, retro gaming, aliens and pyramids *coughing again* …or cats! If I wanted to make views with photos, well I guess it wouldn’t be in tango either… maybe penguins? Or cats?
I have already had some relative worldwide successes in other domains that are less of a niche than tango, and if I wanted fame, I could have sticked to that. Though... these kind of successes are not that much of a deal now that everybody is potential an expert, a producer and an artist and the real success is left to those who manage to monetise the pipes and channels that transport your content (physically or virtually).
Yet I guess I would show myself more in my works, which for now I mostly restrain to texts..
If we shoot tango, I guess that’s because we like tango both as a dance, as a social place, for some people in it, for the atmosphere, for the music, ... (I stopped dancing for an undefined period of time, but this is explained here: "Why I stopped dancing" and yet I have to see doctors regarding some possible injury that I don’t want to let get worse but that doesn't mean that I don't like the dance itself.)
And yet I prefer to shoot five people and the five of them are happy of just to getting some nice pictures than shooting 300 people where 50 are unhappy and 200 don’t care and/or tell shit behind my back. (This can also be true regarding maestro videos.)
Fame is not the problem, the problem when there is a lack of honesty and respect.
Intellectual property is a basic right when creating something and is not only about money but I’ll come back to it later.
One thing to take into account is that, in many cases, protecting photographs is not against the photographees1 but does also protects them against misuse of their image.
Do you want your image to be used as a book cover or in a press release without your consent? Or do you prefer that I get contacted so that I can contact you in my turn to know your opinion about it and potentially share profits?
This is one of the most hypocrite assumptions we usually face: one thing that is often denied but is real, is that we (tango photographers) bring some value in tango, in an economics definition of value. It is said that to organise events, you need a DJ, your need a barman, you need somebody at the entrance… but you don’t need a photographer, hence they don’t bring any value. In the scope of a single event, this may be true. But in a larger scope, if there were no tango photographers, you would need to hire (non-tango) photographers at least some times. And non-tango photographers, there's a good chance that they just shoot it wrong. So, there are some savings done there and, when we are not paid, or when we are underpaid, we actually support a part of the promotional costs.
In addition to those savings, photography (and video) also brings people to tango. I personally started following tango classes after seeing some videos and some photographs (the photographs were from JPB), not only because of those but they largely contributed to put images on words I had heard from some friend. Some people also told me that they came to some specific event because I published some related photos, and some other told me they tried tango after seeing photos or videos.
Concretely, photos remind people that tango exists, that some events exist and helps people who heard about tango from their friends to put nice images on the words, because they see them on their friends' profiles.
I'm not saying it's all perfect but this is modern age promotion.
With videos I also put the words "Brussels Tango Festival" in front of people's eyes nearly 2.000.000 times. (Edit in January 2022: Now it's more than 20.000.000 times for mostly both Brussels and Antwerp tango festivals.)
Each photographer/videographer is an additional channel, an additional network that you can reach. And each different style will reach different tastes and sensitivities. Though, it's hard to tell what is the optimal number of photographers/videographers to have and where is the point of diminishing returns, that probably depends on the event.
"Please, get fucked, smile and be happy about it."
It is funny and sad at the same time how things often become "not serious" when it comes to potential responsibilities… The same behaviour in other contexts would look completely ridiculous:
Imagine that you get a holiday house built and you tell the guy who built it: "Well, you know it’s only a holiday house, I only plan to spend a few weeks here from time to time, when I don't work, so let’s say I don’t have to pay the full price!"
Or when I buy a camera, imagine I tell the shop guy "- You know, it’s a camera for tango. Tango is not serious. Can I get it for free? - Oh, of course sir! If it’s not serious, just take whatever you want. And I’ll be very happy if you spit in my face before you go!" (Hmm… I inverted some chapters and this last sentence refers to something that is coming next.)
So, there is no way something is not serious because it is tango. Tango exists in the same world and in the same space-time as your day job and as photography, it has outcomes and incomes and it can be a business.
And the more money you make, the less excuses you have not to pay a fair price for your for what you use.
And very often the people who I had problems with pretend to be "professionals" when they need to show a stronger face, but they pretend not to be "professionals" when it could imply responsibilities. And anyway that’s just a way of hiding the real problem under bullshit talk.
Actually I think that the word "professional" should be banned from all language, it's so... confusing.
Intellectual property can be serious in any context and even without money consideration.
An author can refuse to have their works used for some purpose that they just don’t agree with. One huge example I think about is, whenever I’m looking for a job (currently I’m not), I use to say in interviews that I would not want to work for the weapon industry, and if for any reason the weapon industry would like to use some of my works to help them selling weapons I would say no and that would not be a matter of money.
In more common cases, an author can refuse the use of their works in a situation where they simply do not get basic respect as a person or an artist or whatever they consider to be.
And that’s why you should always take that into account even if the context is not serious, according to your own point of view.
It’s not how it works, please check the laws. Photographs primarily belong to the photographer; your image which may be part of the photograph belongs to you. Hence, to use a photograph, somebody needs the agreement of the photographee(s)1 AND the photographer. A photographee can actually ask for the photo to be removed and/or not used but they still cannot use it without the photographer’s consent. In traffic: if for whatever reason someone crossed a red light in front of you, that still does not allow you to steal their car.
Parts of this assumption come from the fact that Facebook's conditions state that they have the right to display your content and to let their tools and partners display it in places that you would not necessarily expect.
But this is mostly targetting internal Facebook features such as "Make profile picture", "Make cover" or "Share", as well as plug-ins that can be included in external web sites by third parties but still rely on Facebook's APIs.
I think that this allows Facebook to make yet some extra uses of it.
But, the content still does not belong to Facebook, and Facebook is not transferring that usage right to users outside of Facebook itself, which means that you are still not allowed to download content and use for instance for press release or on your own web site or even to re-upload it to Facebook without the actual author's agreement.
Regarding content that is shared in other places of the Internet, the fact that it's technically impossible to forbid download or some kind of reproduction doesn't mean that intellectual property is voided.
It all depends if it comes with a license such as "Creative Commons" or open source licenses. Which is not the case for my photography. But even those licences may come with some of the requirements I'm talking about in this text (such as still recognising who's the initial author of the work, and terms may vary).
But it's not because it's on the Internet that it's public domain. It's just because it is on the Internet that it is easy to steal.
Getting back to my own "intellectual property" stories (but it can be true for others as well), something that I find rather sad is that people now mostly remember two of the most serious disagreements I had about photo usage, but they forget the majority of cases where everything went fine from the start, or where the problems were "politely" solved.
Those "two of the most serious cases" I’m talking about in previous paragraph, they both fall in the following pattern. It’s even possible that one influenced the other.
It’s a figurative situation, not literally something that happened this way, but somehow not so far from some reality:
You lend them your hand with some gift in it, they grab your arm, they take the gift and they take your watch too…
Then they when you ask to get your watch back, they spit in your face telling you that it’s only your fault if your watch was so close to the gift…
Then they optionally run to their friends crying like "He sent me messages to get back his watch, they were longer than what my attention span can stand and they even contained friendly words and suggested some positive ending… And when I wrote him shit he dared to send me a reply. So this is harassment!"
This is manipulation.
This is bullshit storm singularity. (Whatever that means?)
This is harassment in reverse, at best.
This is paranoia, at worst (or the other way around).
In those situations, I usually suggest as soon as possible that we both apologise or forget it without defining who was actually more right than the other. But it’s quite possible that I forgive too easily because then their whole language actually speaks "What peace? You’re my enemy! I need attention and support from the fight I created between with you and me. I will backstab you anyway. And by the way I still don’t want to give back your watch as it is what gives me some power over you and will make you get back in the conflict."
And once initiated, they always come back to that pattern, passively or actively.
I think I met this behaviour three times in tango (one was not about stealing photography but just about psychological aggression and friends manipulation), and life time… something like five or six times (including those from tango)…
One last assumption that isn’t that bad but feels quite repetitive is that people are still assuming that I’m in a milonga only to take photos. I know that some organisers expect photos so I will usually try to get some when I go to their milongas. But I’m mostly going to regular milongas for the atmosphere and because there are often people who I like to meet there.
I still enjoy photography, especially during the summer, but not in the same quantity as before or than some other photographers I know. As I more or less wrote before, I prefer a few very good pics that people actually enjoy than producing industrial quantities just for the sake of it.
Aside from tango photography, I still probably enjoy even more doing tango (maestro) videos but they became more and more time consuming, hence there I’m also more into quality than quantity.
I also considered getting back in a tango classes as, weirdly enough, I enjoy learning tango more than practicing it… But, I'm also into other things and as usual I won't have time for everything.
This text is full of micro conclusions that I won’t repeat or summarise here.
Yes, tango photography as we know it today is some gift we share with the tango crowd. But what is accepting a gift if you don’t show minimum honesty and respect to the people offering it and use it beyond limitations or as a tool for backstab.
The thing is that that gift is NOT a full copyright transfer especially in case of professional use.
So keep in mind that you have some rights on pictures but also that you are not supposed to bypass photographers rights when using their photographs as well as the photographer should not bypass you if making extra use of works you appear in or if you ask for them not to be used at all… So if you have a problem with photography try managing it in a civilised way with the photographer(s). We’re not just photo machines.
And, as I wrote in a previous text, try staying away from, not necessarily the persons, but the behaviours that initiate aggression, conflict, division behind fake smiles rather than helping them targeting those who are trying to solve these issues and to do things right.
I realise that I skipped one topic that is at the crossroad of this text’s introduction’s "insulting incident" and "The diva manipulation pattern". Probably because I felt like it would somehow be redundant as it could partly be deduced from these previous chapters, but I think that it deserves to be developed more extensively on its own.
A first consequence of this new chapter will be to remove the blur I put on the introduction’s photographee’s gender: "he-or-she" is a "she". Because I don’t want to write sentences that would let suppose that I could be interested in men while I’m not. Nothing against gay people, but for due to personal past events, I don’t like confusion about it.
Yet this chapter could somehow be generalised into a response to that common assumption that when a man expresses anything about a woman it means that he wants sex (though for some guys, this may be true).
Very recently, the person I’m talking about in the introduction as the photographee has drawn some people attention using false accusations according to which I harassed her and was "interested" in her. It’s unclear how far harassment and interest are related in those beliefs but I heard both mixing up.
The truth is that over the last two years, we had something like four written exchanges (plus one depending on how you count when she contacted back me to insult me after some conversion break) and I think that we had even fewer verbal exchanges. They were more frequent in 2015 but, back then, she was replying nicely most of the time. Yet none of these ever held any typical harassment content, mostly stuff about tango, videos, texts etc.
Her claim that I was interested in her was supposedly supported by the fact that in 2015 I wrote some public text about my appreciation of some of her works (which she approved before I published), that I shot many photos of her including some of my best, that I printed one of them in large format because I wanted to test some metal printing technique and thought it was a really good photograph and one of those that would scale up the best.
(I then offered that print to the organiser where the photograph was shot, along with some other prints. I was mainly offering the other prints and I explained that this one was a special case bonus as the photographee's agreement should be asked first before displaying it and that it should be given back to me if the photographee did want it displayed and didn't want it for herself. As the organiser was closer friends than I was with the photographee, I thought their communication would be easier… Much later I can tell that though organiser agreed with my terms, she actually didn't give a **** about what I was saying, as the photographee didn't want the picture displayed and instead of giving it back to me as agreed, the organiser used is as a support plank/frame to display paper prints over it. Trust no one...)
By the way, this is absolutely not the way I fall in love nor how I express it. Whenever it happens, I don’t express it through public texts or posts nor by taking photos and I’m not the kind "contemplate" it the way that was suggested here. Even if I don’t fall in love easily, when I decide to express it, it comes in a rather straightforward, yet polite, way. And I never felt love for the person I’m writing about.
When it comes to taking photographs, I try to literally treat everybody equal. I don’t mean that I try to have the same amount of photographs of everybody in some given event; I mean that that if you get in front of my lens at the right time, in the right place, in the right light and in the right position, you are no less or more of a candidate for a good photograph than anybody else, regardless of the fact that I love you or that I don’t (unless you don’t want to be shot of course, or if you really pissed me off).
Of course if I spend more time with somebody or if we randomly often get to the same events, there will likely be more photographs of that person and there may be some extra satisfaction after a good shot of somebody I like is done and edited but these are independent from the whole photographic process, it's just a personal bonus on top of it. Yet, there have been a very few cases, of people who for some reason I never wanted to shoot but those are extremely rare exceptions.
I never felt love for that person, but indeed I had some respect for her, for some things she does and create, hence it seemed natural to me that she appeared in photographs, texts and stuff like that as a part of the Brussels tango scene and as she does things that bring attention to her. Yet apart from the incident I would have welcomed her as a friend, as I would do for actually most people.
I wrote that some of her words read like those of some "totalitarian tango-elite", because the words and behaviours of that person actually makes you feel like everybody has not the same rights. She seems to really be denying people’s integrity in favour of her friends-preferences or greed for some gain. And indeed since approximately last year, she acts like she’s got something against me, personally, no reason, or may be imaginary ones. Hence, it’s even less surprising if she’s telling shit behind my back.
Anyway, even if you hate somebody, for wrong reason or even if it was for good reasons, that should not be an excuse for misusing their works.
She crossed and blurred the line between emotion and "professionalism" and now that it's all blurred, I am myself confused about where we stand.
I am not saying that harassment doesn’t exist or that it is a good thing but, in such a case, "harassment" is used to divert attention from actual responsibilities… responsibilities which should have stayed a very small thing with civilised people.
I would compare this to actual cases of people who, in example, don’t want to pay for the services of their lawyer and say "If you ask for your money again we call the police!".
This is what I call reversed harassment, or yet intimidation.
The only thing I would concede is that some people sometimes say that I write "long texts" and indeed I do sometimes write long texts, when I have things to say, but that is mostly because I like to be precise and complete in whatever I tell or ask… which often results into the opposite to what I expected and more things to explain because of usual communication gaps. Because I assumed that people are smarter on that subject than they are, or because I assumed that I am smarter on that subject than I am, or both... and that they would find the right interpretation of what I'm writing and not some twisted one.
And also I usually just enjoy building phrases, I don't know why, I have some kind of fascination for aligning words... Though I don't think that I have any kind of great universal message to transmit...
Though that specific person I'm writing about has not received specifically long texts.
I sometimes heard things like more than five or seven lines in "complete English" without abbreviations and smileys is long text… to which I’d reply, please just go get a brain that can focus on actual matters rather than protocols.
When we happened to be at the same milonga after her claim, I don't think that I even wanted to speak to her, if I remember well I simply ignored her and she did the same... But I noticed that people where surrounding her as if I had any intention to hurt her physically... which I found quite hurtful myself... Like, I could not approach the garbage to throw something in it because she was standing right next to it...
Now, despite the fact that this comes at the end of such a long chapter, to me, this is probably one of my most important paragraphs of all I wrote (I mean all texts including). This is my opinion about harassment and violence in general and it was my opinion even long before the #MeeToo campaigns and so on:
I’m opposed to any form violence. I hate psychological violence as much as physical violence. (I am not saying that I wouldn't defend myself though.) I’ve known enough of both (mostly psychological, but sometimes there was blood) in my childhood, in teen age, in work places... not to wish it to anyone.
I just don’t understand sexualisation of women that may take place in the streets, work places, social places… But most of all I despise the frequent sexualisation and objectification of women that takes place in many males-only conversations. I often want to react when confronted to those, but in most cases, when it just sounds like a stupid joke about to be forgotten or when in contrary the testosterone level is too high, the only realistic thing to do is to let it go.
And even in private communication, I don't like sexualisation. (I never used it much and last time I remember using it was approximately 18 years ago, mimicking things I had heard when I realised those were not my type of words.)
But yet, women (or men) using false claims of harassment, possibly to cover their own misdeeds, as well as those who persist in "supporting" them should be treated no better than actual harassers or rapists.
(And I'm really talking about people who you can meet regularly in Brussels milongas and festivals, some may even be teachers I think... to me they aren't worth better than this.)
Regarding love and such things, I’d naively say that I would like to "love" everybody as friends. (Though my social-cognitive capacities are sometimes over-saturated.)
But some people they take it, they turn it into hatred, violence, backstab and then throw it back at you. And in those cases, well I’m not Jesus.
There are some people who I love more than others, and there is one person who I love more than anything else. She is not anybody I already wrote about in this text and she knows who she is without any ambiguity.
By the way, she doesn’t love me back, we were and we're still friends… things would be too easy…
Regarding the insults incident described in introduction, in assumption #10, and to some extent in the "manipulation pattern", someone told me, after some time, you forget. Well, yes and no.
First, I did not write this text, these parts of the text, in seek for some revenge but in hope to clarify some beliefs and rumours.
I already wrote it but what I feel about it is more something like hurt, some kind of betrayal and a need to keep a defensive stance, not anger or rage.
On another hand, even if it's not about holding grudge, time doesn't solve everything... Such as: if somebody steals from you and you are a certain time after that theft and they haven't done anything to honestly gain some form of redemption from you, they're still absolute thieves. Being forgotten is exactly what a thief expects. (This example is not necessarily linked to the initial incident of photography theft.)
Yet, facts happen at a certain moment in time, but repeated poor behaviours as I faced in this case from that photographee prevent wrong deeds from getting obsolete and make them likely to be repeated more times.
When trust is broken that way, it's not like a Care Bear is going to come and repair everything with some magic rainbow.
I would not ask for anything better than sorting it out together and continue to coexist the same way as before... but I hardly see how I could actually trust some people again.
Hence, I don't see how time by itself could heal anything here... I have already been friendly enough, it's not my turn to be friendly.
That person has been launching false rumours behind my back. The only thing that would make me consider "forgetting", while staying on my guard... and I don't expect this to happen... could possibly be public excuses, or not necessarily excuses but some form of rational explanation and resolution.
TC, November 2017
Last modification, January 2022