Photoshopped Sepulchers

Dear Readers,

I’m kind of upset about something.

A few years ago, when I was home from college during a Thanksgiving break, my family got a family portrait taken. My mother bought us all matching outfits for the occasion. I remember my acne was much worse than it is now.

A few weeks after that Thanksgiving Break, when I was home for Christmas Break, I looked at our family portrait, and I noticed that my face in the picture was very clear. Strangely clear. I looked at the picture and I looked in the mirror, and I was shocked that just a few weeks ago, my complexion was pimple-free. But I just thought, “Well, my acne comes and goes in spurts, and I’m lucky that my face was clear on the day those photos were taken.”

A month or so later, though, I found out the truth. My mother told my sister, and my sister told my girlfriend (who is now my wife) and my girlfriend told me. My face had been photo-shopped. Airbrushed. The photographer erased all my acne using computer technology.

When my girlfriend told me about the doctored-up photos, I was confused and angry. I wanted to drive all the way to my parents’ house and burn all those pictures, because they were lies. I felt as though my mother, the photographer, and everybody else who knew about it had entered into a conspiracy against me.

Of course they had good intentions, and of course they felt like they had my best interest in mind. Maybe they thought that I would have liked it. Or maybe the airbrushing wasn’t premeditated at all. Maybe the photographer said at the last minute, “Hey, for another $50, I can make all of Telemoonfa’s acne disappear,” and my parents agreed to it without consulting me. Who knows.

And I remember feeling then, as I sort of feel now, that I should at least have ownership of my own image. (Alas, we don’t have absolute control over the way we are perceived.)

But I couldn’t burn those pictures or throw them away. They were expensive family photographs. Plus, they had already been dispersed throughout my extended family. To round all those pictures up and destroy them would have been a formidable task. And I would have faced mountains of opposition from my family members, especially from my mother. The whole thing would have been very embarrassing, and I didn’t want to start a fight, so I just tried to forget about the whole thing, and I never brought it up to my family.

The bottom line is, my mother wanted to think that she had a son without acne, and so that what she has in the picture. A son without acne. Good for her. She has what she wants. A picture in the hallway of me with clear skin. A representation of a face that never existed.

Does my mother realize, though, that by altering those photographs, she’s altering history?

But I suppose altering history and hiding unpleasant facts are only natural, motherly things to do. People do it all the time in scrapbooks, in yearbooks, in photo albums, on myspace pages, on facebook pages, in journals, in blogs, in press conferences, at Church on Sunday, in Christmas family newsletters, on resumes, in job interviews, at family reunions, at high school reunions, in sales pitches, at company parties, and the list goes on and on and on.

The past gets glorified. The unpleasant things about people are swept under the rug.

Like just look at this post I recently read from Gunnell Family Happenings: http://mjgunnellfamily.blogspot.com/2009/03/st-patricks-day.html (It’s a blog I follow. I think Gunnell Family Happenings can be seen as a representative of many cutesy-wutesy family blogs) The post is about how the Gunnell family went to the park on St. Patrick’s day. I’ll sum it up for you. It says:

“The weather is gorgeous. It’s a nice day. The kids are gorgeous. The gorgeous kids feed the ducks. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so the festive, happy people that work at the park made the water green. Mrs. Gunnell’s children enjoy their childhood, and Mrs. Gunnell enjoys her adulthood. Everything is gorgeous. What a nice family the Gunnells have. The End.”

I don’t mean to show disrespect for the Gunnell’s blog. It’s very nice, and it fulfills its purpose nicely.

Very few people are capable of depicting themselves honestly.

And what is honesty, anyway?

Matthew 23:27:

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones…”

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa