Sun-Shiny

We take school pictures every year. These pictures are then put in the yearbook, and if you purchased prints of the picture they are put in wallets and on refrigerators and (if you live at my house) put into a school-picture-drawer. A week or two or three later when the pictures arrive, friends and enemies gather to look at each other’s pictures. Another week goes by and then there are re-take pictures. Why go to all this fuss?

It’s an important day in a little kid’s life—preparing carefully what to wear, how you are going to do your hair, and especially practicing the smile you will use—but not too much, otherwise it will look forced. Although school pictures are more casual, there is still a lot of planning involved. Even when others in my family have taken the photogenic genes in the family and I have always had only so-so pictures, I really love looking at everyone else’s pictures because I like them so much.

A photograph stops time. So does the simple action of taking the picture. My grandpa was a photographer for the high school yearbook and professionally later. My grandpa showed me a picture he took of himself, with all his camera equipment, when he was a young man. He looks the same. Older now, of course, but I can recognize him with no problem at all. By that picture I can see him now as he was then. Pictures are amazing; we still use the black and white glass-plate pictures in history books that Matthew Brady, commissioned by Abe Lincoln, took to document the Civil War. Even my dad remembers that the photographer went under a black cloth to take his school picture.

With photographs we are able to return to an age that we will never be again, to see again what life was like, but this time with a new perspective. Before photographs there were paintings, and there have always been engravings on wood and stone. We make picture records because it is important to us to remember, and images help us do that. And that is why we have school pictures. That, and to be able to exclaim at how cute we were.