Confession: I like picture day, and I always have. And it’s picture day today for our two daughters.
This might seem a little strange coming from a photography nerd who partially makes her living taking photos and keeps 20,000 of them in a family digital archive (I’m not even kidding), but there it is.
I love those picture day portraits, because they document the passage of time in a very clear way. The poses are always the same, as are the backgrounds (more or less). The only thing that interrupts all that sameness is the passage of time, which is reflected in their changing faces, hairstyles, and outfits of choice. The obvious and true observation to make is that it’s amazing to see how much they change every year.
Yes, the photos are kind of cheesy. Yes, the package deals are kind of a rip off and the ordering system is archaic, but I won’t stop shelling out until the girls are out of school. I just can’t bring myself to drop picture day.
Picture day is a lot different now that the girls are teenagers. Picture day USED to be favourite dresses (mostly MY favourite dresses, ahem) and carefully brushed hair (most of the time). It’s a lot more casual now. It’s just showing up in your fave t-shirt for the most part. And perhaps it’s seen as uncool if you hint at efforts beyond a touch of makeup and carefully arranged hair.
At some point a few years ago I had the idea that I would keep all of the 8x10s from their photo packages into an album with plastic sleeves. I slide them in so each pair of pages facing each other is from the same year. Turn the page, and it shows the next year, and so on. And that’s all that’s in this book: no artfully designed layouts, no fancy displays of penmanship, no scrapbook corners.
The album idea is a very low-maintenance way of keeping them handy, but here’s where I have to confess that I haven’t added the photos for the last couple of years. (Gah. I know they’re around here SOMEWHERE). It is very nice though, to be able to pick it up and flip through the pages. It’s a walk down memory land every time, at which point I always find myself wondering how it is we have become parents of teenagers. Sigh.
It’s funny to think about how much photography has change as a whole. The overwhelming majority, say 99.9% of the photos we have, exist only in digital format on our hard drives: ones and zeros arranged to show the nose they inherited from their mother, or blue eyes from their father.
The picture day photos are actually among the few prints we own, which again reminds me of how precarious our digital photo libraries are. What if our house burned down? Well, at least I could grab my album of picture day photos on the way out the door…
