Last month, I hired a family photographer. My daughter was 6 months old, and it seemed like a good age to get some nice shots. When the photos came back, I clicked through the album with something that felt like relief. “It’s a good thing we had these photos taken,” I told my husband. “Jane would have been mad if we’d gotten them done for her brother and not her.”
Jane would have been mad. Our infant who doesn’t have the thumb mobility yet to exercise her pincer grasp. The message I was sending, that I hadn’t meant to send but that slipped from my lips like so many dropped Gerber puffs, is that having her photograph taken is our daughter’s birthright.
Then last week I got an email from my friend, who had something big to tell me. That was how she described it: “I have something big to tell you. But you can’t tell anyone else.” I wrote back that it sounded pretty juicy, so I’d probably be telling lots of people, but that she had to tell me now anyway.
“I’m starting a photography business,” she replied. “So if you say anything, don’t say anything.”
I knew what she meant. She’s our third friend in the past two years to want to start a D.C.-area photography business. The other two haven’t made it past making their businesses’ Facebook pages.
We don’t have buckets of mutual friends.
In fairness, I know a fourth girl, Melissa, who started her photography business eight years ago. She took art classes, worked up a nice website and spent the better part of two years shooting gigs pro bono. Now she’s got a business going. Melissa’s at a lot of weddings. She knows a lot of pregnant ladies.
Personally, I don’t envy her. At the weddings I’ve been to, the photographers have not been smiling. They’re all hustle. Melissa, I noticed, barely put a single one of her own wedding pictures up on social media.
Which brings me back to my daughter. Now that I have these nice photographs of her, what am I supposed to do with them? Who’s all this picture-perfect documentation for?
I had pictures taken when I was growing up too. There was usually about 20 minutes’ notice; 10 of them were spent in the car, driving to Sears. My mom still has some of those photos. They live in her wallet—the only place they’ve lived, ever, for her and the occasional mildly interested coworker.
Full disclosure: Melissa took the pictures of my family with my daughter. And we spent the whole shoot talking about the now-ludicrous nature of photo shoots.
Ours was not the exception. My 2-year-old son, who at the 6-month mark had a photo shoot all his own, made sure to have three-quarters of Jane’s focused on him, while he ate the better part of a bag of Goldfish crackers.
I’m not complaining. The pictures of him cramming artificially dyed fish shapes in his mouth are some of the best photos we got. The yearning for salt and carbohydrates really shines through in his eyes, so much so that the rest of the shots pale in comparison. Those photographs of my son are authentic. The others, at least some of them, fall prey to what Melissa says is a hazard of the family-photography business: the need for twee.
Here’s how I dressed my family for our photo shoot: stonewashed jeans, various sweater vests, an L.L.Bean puffy jacket, one pink cardigan with matching baby tights. Here’s how we dress on a regular basis: stonewashed jeans; T-shirts; maybe a stain on one of the T-shirts from the last meal that we ate, or the one before that.
Everyone, that day, was so cute. Cookie-cutter cute. Cute enough for the mantel, the Christmas card, the lead photo of a Facebook page. The cuteness: so stifling only a toddler could break free of it, frenzied by snacks and a lot of bonus attention.
I had overthought. Fallen victim to the twee. Before photo day, Jane hadn’t worn a cardigan a day in her life. She hadn’t worn pink.
Recently, I was scrolling through a jobs site where I saw a post for a yearbook teacher at a private school where I happen to know tuition runs $30,000 a year. Yearbook teacher: That’s a job I’d like to have. All the students would be so happy in that class. Their parents would hate it, though. If a student at that school is taking eight classes, Yearbook is running their parents a cool $3,750. At my high school, Yearbook was a club, composed largely of girls who cared very much about later signing one another’s yearbooks.
Isn’t it amazing they bother to make yearbooks anymore, American humanity in the 21st century being what it is? That is, a distillation of itself projected on the internet. If you enjoy a champagne lunch on the beach under a double rainbow, does the cork pop if the rainbow isn’t re-hued and posted to Instagram?
Am I guilty? So very guilty. My baby learned to smile for my iPhone at 5 months of age. Smiles for iPhone: It’ll be in baby books soon as an official milestone. My older sister tells me I don’t have to worry—that wanting to please you is only a phase, and they grow out of it fast.
Skip back two generations in my family, and there aren’t a lot of photographs. We do have paintings of family members: my father as a young boy, my grandmother as a woman in her 30s. End list. We have two of them. I can tell you those paintings have garnered themselves some prime eye-level real estate on our family-room and living-room walls.
What will survive of my daughter’s photographs, two or three generations from now? Surely not all these shots will still be around. I don’t wish that on her grandchildren. What are they supposed to do with them? There aren’t enough mantels on our block for the number of pictures I took of Jane this past week.
There was a line somewhere, and we’ve crossed it. Or, if not a line, an intent, an attitude about capturing our own selves that went sour.
And yet.
My dad takes a group photo every time our extended family gets together. He does it today; he did it five years ago. He’s been doing it for as long as I can remember, at least since the ’80s. We all roll our eyes every time he (very politely) asks us to herd together in the front yard or living room. And the shots aren’t professional—because he’s not a professional. He doesn’t pretend that he is.
You also don’t see a lot of those photos on Facebook. In a million years, you would never describe them as twee. But there’s one in particular that everyone just loves. In it, no one’s looking at the camera, or even expecting the shot. We’re still all clumped together, though, for a picture we think is to be taken shortly. It catches all of us off-guard in a way that’s casual and quite real. It occupies the place of four mantels that I know of.
My son and daughter aren’t in that photograph; the wedding where it was taken was well before they came along. They’re familiar with it, though, and can point their grandparents out in it.
Where that photo’s concerned, birthright’s the wrong word. That would suggest some degree of entitlement, of deservedness.
And my kids aren’t entitled to that picture. They are damn lucky to have it.
