another zoo picture

I took a course at Wesleyan called the Sociology of Tourism from a professor named Lynn Owens who had a shaved head and wore black shorts and kneesocks to class everyday. We talked about zoos a lot, and those conversations have stuck with me. I think about them a lot with a lot of the pictures I've picked out from enormous piles-- pictures where the view is totally bathed with intent. It seemed pertinent to write about this one, because my own family is guilty of this kind of tourism too (see last post). I like this picture because it is so absurd-- what is it really of? the experience of seeing an ostrich? a specific time this gentleman and curly-haired woman stood next to eachother, watching? Because everything is cut off-- the people are obscured, the ostrich out-of-context, the landscape anonymous. I want to know if it's the first time these people had seen an ostrich and how 'real' or 'constructed' the experience felt to them. What did they learn? What did they remember?