By Heather Skyler / The Orange County Register
I didn’t take a photo of my daughter this morning before I dropped her off to begin seventh grade. It wasn’t really a conscious decision. We had to leave pretty early, and I spilled a smoothie on the corner of my husband’s keyboard, which set us back a bit, and we were both generally worried about making it to school on time. Also, it seems indecent to take a photo before 7 am somehow. So, no photo.
The missed photo didn’t occur to me until I got to work and saw all the pictures of friends’ kids smiling in their crisp, first-day-of-school clothes on Facebook. I liked seeing their faces and thinking about their first days, mulling over the passage of time, the distance between us, that sort of thing.
It got me to pondering the overwhelming photographic archive we have of our lives today, and wondering how having so many photos affects us.
There is definitely no picture of me on my first day of seventh grade. The only one I can recall is the official school photo (big feathered hair, striped Izod shirt, braces), though I’m sure there are a few shots of me from that year with the family on a picnic, or in my band uniform holding my flute before a concert, or standing beside my sister in front of a Christmas tree. You know, the old standards. But there is no document of my day-to-day life other than what lives inside my mind and on the pages of an old journal, which exists somewhere in my garage.
My daughter, Lux, on the other hand, has the photos I took at the beach this weekend, and the ones she and her friends snapped while goofing around in her bedroom, and the selfies she took of a cool makeup look she was trying out for Halloween. And that’s just from one week of her life.
I love photos and I sometimes wish I had more from my childhood, but they can also feel like a burden. The constant image-making of today comes with pressures: to look good while doing everything, and to constantly think about what something looks like, rather than just how it feels. There’s also a thin layer of the future on all of these pictures, the weight of how each photographed day will be remembered and preserved.
Imagine the era of tintype or daguerreotype photographs, when people had to stand in a pose for several minutes while their image was being slowly copied onto a thin piece of metal. Back in the 1800s, there was no such thing as a captured photographic moment. What was it like, then, to see an image yourself? It must’ve been a very odd experience.
You rarely see a smile in those very old photos. For one, it was difficult to hold a natural smile for as long as it took to take a photograph. Also, it was considered bad taste to smile. According to one essay on the subject by Cambridge lecturer Nicholas Jeeves, “By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment…. Showing the teeth was, for the upper classes, a more or less formal breach of etiquette.”
Add to this the fact that many people had rotten or crooked teeth and the lack of smiles makes sense. (Jeeves, however, says rotten teeth were so common in that early era of photographs that they didn’t even register as unattractive.)
I don’t long for an era of rotten teeth and stern expressions, but just imagine how freeing it must have been not to be surrounded by images at all hours of the day. Now we scroll through daily selfies of each other and of the famous and beautiful. While I love photos of my kids and family and of friends and places I miss, I don’t like the constant barrage of images we all have daily and the way it lures me into comparing myself with other people and other lives. But how do we step out of society’s rapid stream of images without becoming hermits or missing out on the fun of shared photographs?
I’m sure that after school today, I will take a photo of my daughter. I don’t want to not have that first-day photo just to make some sort of point to myself.
Photographs tell a story. That is their power and their beauty. When we capture numerous images on a daily basis, the story is sometimes diluted; the images begin to lack power.
But we are fortunate to have these pictures, to imagine other people’s lives and recall our own. The people in very old photos are so alien, so inscrutable. I’ve stared at old black-and-whites of my great-grandparents and of unknown relatives, willing them to tell me something, but they are mysterious and distant. Will our smiling selfies be just as impenetrable to people 150 years from now? There will be so many images for future generations to sift through; how will they even know which ones are important?