I like taking pictures. I don’t like being in pictures. A distinction.

This afternoon, several Indian families requested to take a photograph with me. The first time it caught me off guard. I was sitting on a bench in a monastery, writing in my red journal and sipping a bottle of water. Suddenly, I noticed a pair of eyes inching closer to my face. I looked up.

“Hello,” the Indian man said timidly, clutching a fancy camera in his hand. “Can you…” he trailed off, unable to find the right words. I stared back in confusion.“Picture…?” He continued.

Oh! Sure thing! He wanted a fellow photographer to take a snapshot of his family in the monastery, and I was happy to help. But as I held my arm out for his camera, he interrupted my reach.“No, no. Picture with you…?”

“Oh.” I laughed, probably turning red. “With me? Really?” I agreed, also timidly, and the family huddled around me with enthusiastic grins.

Anoop smiled. “They’ve probably never seen a white person before,” he said.

Shortly after my modeling debut, we heard yelling and clapping downstairs. The monks were debating and I wanted to check it out. I think it’s a daily practice: they all pair off and argue about something for a really long time, smacking their hands together with every good point. It seems like they’re talking about the meaning of life or enlightenment, something profound and philosophical. But it’s all in Tibetan, so they could very well be debating the pros and cons of going commando beneath their robes, and I wouldn’t know the difference. “It’s breezier and you don’t get wedgies!” “There’s no support, no protection!”

I digress. Whatever they were discussing, I thought the whole affair was pretty cool, and many other tourists agreed. We all ogled away and clicked our cameras, trying to capture the scene.  I felt like we were at a zoo.

Hoping to escape the chaos, I wandered over to a quieter area on the other side of the monastery. I watched some more monks, took some more pictures, and then turned back toward the crowd. On my way, I met my second fan club: an Indian family with an army of little children. “Picture…?”I turned red, paying the toll of another awkward smile so I could continue forward. A trail of Indian children giggled in my wake, and I wondered if blushing would make me look less white. A moment later, somebody interrupted my thoughts with a tap on the shoulder. It was an Indian couple with big smiles and bigger cameras. You know the story. Say cheese?

I suddenly felt like a zoo animal myself.

Whenever I travel, I always struggle with the ethics of photography. The journalist in me wants to snap away at anything and everything that moves me—and that’s often people. I want to remember them—the emaciated women and children working construction along a Delhi highway; the maroon-robed monks who are deep in meditation; the crooked old lady with braided hair who walks slowly with around the monastery, so proud and wise. I want to turn them into art with my camera.

The problem is, people are not zoo animals. I don’t want to be another obnoxious tourist, so busy looking through my lens that I fail to see things with my own two eyes. I don’t want to turn somebody’s life into a gimmick, a Kodak moment for some ignorant American who wants a souvenir. My white skin may be a novelty to those Indian families, but when people point, stare and ask to take pictures, I feel a bit like meat. Slum children and Buddhist monks are new to me, but does my camera make them feel the same way? Is it okay to photograph strangers when you travel? What if you’re a journalist? Does that change anything?

I like taking pictures. I don’t like being in pictures. A distinction. Do we all make it?