'The Whiz'

Toilets are nearly everywhere in the USA and even Europe, being

found in restaurants, filling stations and other public places, but in

Eastern Europe they area precious commodity and sometimes

viewed as 'optional', especially for males, as this photo, taken with

view of 20 to 30 people, illustrates. Your ratings, critiques and

observations are invited and most welcome. If you rate harshly, very

critically or wish to make a remark, please submit a helpful and

constructive comment; please share photographic knowledge to help

improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

Long distance buses, complete with on-board televisions for taped entertainment, don't have rest rooms and don't stop at restaurants or filling stations, but may stop at what once long ago was a 'pit stop' or latrine, long disused but maybe still reeking of decades of use.

The result is passengers, often stuck in a seat for two or even three hours, women included, are left beside a well-traveled highway on its side, with no bushes or tree line for hundreds of yards to hide behind to 'do their business', and of course, the males do, and that is considered 'what happens.' and 'Life in Eastern Europe' with its travails.

For women, it's a little more delicate, something they can cover up if they're wearing a flowing skirt or dress that billows if they squat, but with no tree line or latrine (sometimes) or organized rest room at some bus stops, they're left to the ultimate indignity of just going far into some frozen field away from the men and relieving themselves or trying to hold on for another couple of hours.

This man is in front of a major city train station -- one of Europe's largest but he'd have to pay 25 cents to urinate in a toilet and either didn't have it, or didn't feel like paying for it.

Administration:  if you feel such depiction is outside the bounds of Photo.net 'good taste' for this advertised 'adult site', depicting an entire continent that features fountains of children urinating as public features, then you are free to withdraw this photo.  If you do so, please let me know; I do not seek to test Photo.net boundaries.

john

John (Crosley)

In the USA to do so exposes one (particularly one of a 'suspect or downtrodden group - especially formerly) to charges of being a 'sexual pervert' and 'exposing oneself'.

Thus to do so in daylight in the open in the USA runs a grave risk.

So imagine two things:

1.  One has kidney stones which require frequent and great urgency when passing, and the urge is virtually unstoppable.  The risk in going out is even to go by car six blocks to scope out every rest room possible then pray that the urge doesn't hit too hard (though it's everpresent and really, really, really hurts) and to give in (as above) to urinate in public, is to run the risk of arrest, not for urinating but for being labeled mistakenly a 'sex pervert'.

2.  Imagine that the same individual has prostate or bowel cancer and has had a regimen of abdominal radiation.  That radiation is designed to kill the cancerous cells say of the prostate but WEAKENS terrifically for months the cells of all the surrounding organs including the prostate and the urge to urinate AND the ability to control it.  One, similarly, becomes a prisoner of the urge to urinate, controlled barely by medicine and particularly more by dehydration (e.g. don't drink anything for days).

I've been through such things in my lifetime and avoided the above problem -- in the USA too many cops are going to send you to the judge not understanding that urination for the ill is a medical emergency, not something that people do who have had too much beer, and as one judge said in paraphrase $3 in and $75 out! as he sentenced a public urinator in one recent case I read about.

That's probably the BEST thing that can happen.

The worst in the USA is that the cops take a dislike to you or the class you belong to (gay, black, etc.) and that you are charged with 'sexual perversion' and exposing one's self, which carries with it retroactively in many cases, an ankle bracelet for life as a 'convicted sex offender' and the requirement one not live within thousands of yards of public schools and such, for life, however wrongly convicted or regardless of long-ago facts which never will recur and NO WAY TO CORRECT the misplaced classification.

This country is much more lenient.

If you gotta go, you gotta go, and public toilets are scarce.

Some people don't have the 25 cents it takes, so out it comes and out it goes.

Notice, however, he does so modestly (turned away from the people and the photographer).  (I know the people don't show here, but they are at curbside.)

Thanks for a helpful comment.

john

John (Crosley)

Henri took a similar photo.

Meir, I am not surprised Henri took a similar photo, but don't recall the photo,and I'm seldom surprised by seeing 'new' photos of his.

I know most of the ones that have made it into circulation, plus I've been through the top 2,000 photos as once were exhibited on the Magnum Photo web site.  Some were not 'top' by any means, but they were historically important, I suppose.

I was drawn to this -- it was a photo that 'had to be taken'.

Can you give a link to Henri Cartier-Bresson's similar photo so I can compare?

Thanks for the 'heads up'.

john

John (Crosley)