27 October 2017
Touching Up
And where it leads to.
By Chin Chin
Yes, that’s how it always starts. The innocent little improvement here or there which leads inevitably to a quagmire of illusion and deception. This time the improvement is made to little Jamie. No, no, not surgery. Not the removal of that unfortunate wart, not the injection of more badly-needed brain cells. No, not things which would really improve him per se. No, it is much more important than that. The change is to his image, to his on-line persona; to be more specific, it is to the school photograph. Nowadays the more enterprising photographers are prepared to make small changes to school photographs for a modest fee.
It sounds fair enough on the face of it. You forgot to brush his hair when you sent him out that morning and as a result there are tufts sticking up behind his ears. No doubt that is fashionable amongst parakeets but it isn’t the right look at his smart preparatory school. It is a shame really, and he doesn’t normally look like that, so what harm is there in making the photograph a little more realistic by a bit of on-screen hairdressing? Yes, that would be much better and truer to him as a person if you think about it.
Actually it isn’t the hair that is the main problem. Why did he have to stand next to that awful spotty boy, the one with the reputation for being a member of UKIP? Wouldn’t it be better if the chap next to him were a bit more, well, Hampsteady, if you know what I mean. Jamie is a sensitive, intelligent child, he takes after his parents as it happens, and is likely to spend his life amongst aesthetes. It could blight his career were it known that his best friend at school was the sort of chap whose parents supported Brexit. No, let’s airbrush him and have someone who reflects the friends that Jamie will make later in life. Maybe someone coloured to reflect the family’s tradition of tolerance? Someone like the young Barack Obama for example, and, on the other side – to illustrate that although he is a gentle and true he is no pushover – a sort of modern young Henry V.
Of course the system will work best if it is only your copy of the photograph that gets changed. Otherwise all the parents will start sending in their requirements and you will no sooner have replaced the pimply UKIP supporter with young Barack than the rather vulgar parents of that nasty child on the other side will oust little Jamie in favour of some ghastly Jock from the football team. That’s what comes of letting people from south of the river into a school.
Of course if your photographer was really enterprising, he would set up a market so that if a child was to be moved for a fee, his parents would have the opportunity to counter-bid. There would have to be auctions too of younger versions of famous people to sit next to the child. In fact that would be the only way of keeping control. After all, it would look a bit odd if a juvenile version of Prince Harry appeared six times in the same photo.
No, that is all getting much too complicated. The answer must be a separate photograph for the parents of each child with amendments ordered and paid for by those parents. That keeps things clear and honest and straightforward. Then everyone can have a picture of their own little Jamie surrounded by friends of whom they approve and with his hair perfectly ordered.
Actually, there is no need to limit this to school photographs. Suppose that you want a selfie with a great actor, for example. The convention is that you stand miserably by the actor’s door of the theatre in the rain and hope that he or she will stop to be photographed with you. What is the point of that? You can just as easily import your target into the photograph artificially and tell people that it was a selfie. What is more,with a little dexterity, you can probably get the actor to laugh at your joke, to look admiringly at you or, according to taste, to put his or her hands around your throat. That is a much better image than you would ever get by just standing outside a theatre.
The awful thing about all of this is that people do it already but I suppose that they always did. If Henry VIII commissioned his portrait, I do not suppose that Holbein was above making His Majesty a little bit slimmer, ignoring the warts and all the rest of it. Court painters who did not romanticise a bit did not get clients. Middle Age burghers of Florence appear as minor characters in pictures of the birth of Christ. If it has always been a perfectly respectable thing to do in oils, is there any reason why photography should not follow suit?
Aha, you say, photography is supposed to be a record, but that is not really true either. How many actors always insist on being photographed on their “good” side? How many big game hunters were photographed with a foot on a carcass which had really been shot by someone else? Photography is about presentation, so why should we care if the dishonesty is a little bit more or a little bit less?
There is one area, however, where the touching up of photographs does real damage. When I was at school the annual photograph was taken by arranging 600 boys in a large arc and then using a camera which travelled from one end of the arc to the other. If you were quick enough, it was possible to jump out of your place on one side of the arc, rush round the back and reappear somewhere on the other side, just in time to catch the camera again. It was never very popular with the authorities but it certainly went down well with your friends and in a sense it was a fine athletic achievement. Nowadays, of course, some photographer will airbrush out your second appearance and substitute someone suitable (the young Barack Obama perhaps) instead. That is technically easy to do but at a deeper level it is a deplorable example of bureaucratic power being exerted to change history without the participants’ consent. Worse than that, it is unsporting.
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