A workshop that asks for no cameras

A cabinet maker in Manama has a small handwritten card taped to the door of his workshop. Please, no photographs.

I understand the impulse. He spends weeks on a single piece. The joints are cut by hand, the grain matched across the doors so they read as one board. Someone walks in, lifts a phone, and leaves with the result of all that thinking in a few seconds, without paying for any of it. It feels like something has been taken.

But a photograph does not take the cabinet. Nobody can open it, store linen in it, or hand it down to a daughter. What the picture carries is the idea, and the idea travelling is the best thing that can happen to him.

The person who posts that cabinet is telling everyone they know that it exists, that it is beautiful, and that it came from his bench. A friend saves the picture. A couple furnishing a flat in Riffa asks where it was made. Being the original becomes worth more every time the image is seen, because the people who can afford one want it from the hands whose work they keep running into.

Being copied by a rival is a real risk. It is a much smaller one than being unknown.

The card on the door is guarding the wrong thing. The difficult part of his work was never keeping it out of sight. It was making a cabinet people would want to photograph in the first place, and he has already done that.