Parents are still buying weirdly formal and awkwardly-posed school photos. Why?
When the photo came home from school it was all I could to keep a straight face. My son, seven years old at the time, had been in an experimental hairdo phase and his severe side-part combover slicked down with gel happened to coincide with school portrait day. He looked like a tiny gangster from the 1920s, but in a Nike T-shirt. And, like every year, we ordered prints of the photo, downloaded the digital version, gave out copies to all the grandparents, put one on the fridge and the other 74 identical pictures of varying sizes went in a box with previous years’ photos.
Each March when school portrait day rolls around I tell myself: nope, not this year. We’ll pay for the class photos, we’ll pay for the sports team photos, the kapa haka, eco-warriors and choir photos, too. But the last thing we need is more weirdly formal and awkwardly-posed photos of our kids taken against a mottled grey or beige backdrop (how has this remained unchanged in decades?).
I have a camera with a phone like everyone else and so have thousands and thousands of candid photos of my kids looking adorable, beautiful, funny, grumpy, goofy and stupid. They look like themselves in these photos, often captured on the fly while they’re in the middle of doing other things. The school portrait photos however, are something else entirely. Taken by a stranger who is telling them how to sit, how to angle their body, how to tilt their chin and how to smile – which often results in a maniacal expression, in which lips are peeled back and both rows of teeth are bared and on display – the photos can have a disconcerting feel; I know that’s my kid but it doesn’t really look like my kid.
In fairness to school portrait photographers everywhere, of the terabytes of lovely photos I do have of my kids, there are terabytes more that feature them with eyes closed, mouth open, head blurred, skew-whiff and off-centre. Good photos taken at home are due to probabilities; take enough and you might get one good one, but who’s got the time?
“Taking school portraits is a real art form,” says Greg Chadderton, operations manager of PhotoLife, a 100-year-old photography company that services around 65% of schools throughout the country. Chadderton knows what he’s talking about; his family has owned the company since 1953, making him the third generation involved in the business. PhotoLife photographs kids from daycare age through to high-schoolers, they work with the biggest school in New Zealand (4200 kids) and they work with country schools with two or three children on the roll. They take portraits of students, teachers, caretakers, mascots and school animals; cats, dogs, lambs, goats, hamsters, iguanas, mice, rabbits and chickens. “Chickens are a big one,” says Chadderton.
The photographer’s personality – not their technical expertise – is the most important quality, he says. “You can teach them the camera stuff. But if they can’t interact with a child, and they can’t develop any rapport, we can’t get a good photo. We’ve got a very short window of time with each child, and I’m talking the best part of one minute on a lot of occasions. And so we’ve got to build a relationship, make the child comfortable in their surroundings, then get them to smile and enjoy the moment for the photo.”
Photographers need to be comfortable working with a wide range of ages, too. “On a Monday, you could be photographing an 18-year-old-boy who’s year 13 and hates school and doesn’t want to be there, and then the next day, you could be photographing a five year old who’s at their first day of school.”
Chadderton says demand for school portraits is falling, and has been since the late 1990s as digital photography became mainstream and parents could take their own portraits of their kids with greater ease. At the same time, the company has seen growth in group photos: classes, sports teams and cultural groups. The kinds of photos that are much harder for parents to replicate. “Now, the group photo is by far our best-selling product.”
But, while the number of parents buying portraits is falling, some still are buying them. I’m still buying them!
As far as I can tell, this is for three reasons. The first – guilt – is also the most motivating. Are you going to be the only parents in the class who aren’t prepared to fork out for pictures of your darlings? Obviously you don’t love them enough. This will come up in therapy years later, ultimately costing you loads more. So actually, this is a prudent financial decision.
The second reason I continue to buy annual school portraits is this: having a near identical picture taken of my children around the same time every year in the same setting means I have a recorded time capsule of their development. There he is with his gappy, baby tombstone teeth and drool on the neck of his teeshirt; there he is with his gummy smile and missing teeth; and there he is with impossibly gigantic beavery front teeth that are much too big for his face.
Hairstyles are another way to measure the passing of time. In the first five years of portraits, my daughter’s waist-length hair resembled a big scribble. She refused to brush it, or cut it, and she looked like a wild little cave woman. In the final year of primary school there was a significant (and welcomed) pivot, and from then on her long hair was comprehensively brushed, smoothed, slicked back and middle-parted with just two skinny strands carefully selected and permitted to frame her face.
My own school portrait photographs (my parents loved me) chronicle a similar story; here is my bowl cut and unruly fringe stage – my mum used to cut my hair using a bowl and sticking tape – here is my jaunty pigtail chapter, and here is my deflated bubble fringe era.
The third reason is my own feeble sentimentality. If there is a picture that exists out there of my precious offspring, how can I say ‘no, thank you I don’t want it’? I face a similar challenge when trying to delete pictures that I’ve taken of them. Yes, these 19 photos are all very similar – unsurprising given they were taken within seconds of one another – and yet, when I zoom in, each expression is just slightly different from the one before and the one after. How can I just delete that moment in time?
Of course, as soon as you have more than one kid, you can’t just stop ordering the pictures. The younger siblings will compare the number of photos and will NEVER forgive you. Furthermore, now not only will you purchase a photo of each of them, but you will also buy the combined sibling photograph for as long as they are at the same school together. These photos are really something. They often feature one child with its hand on the other’s shoulder or forearm. When I look at these photos I like to imagine what my kids are thinking in this moment. Only that morning they were arguing about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher and now here they are forced to be not only in close proximity but made to touch. They look so uncomfortable. It makes me laugh, which helps alleviate the feeling of school portrait induced financial ruin.
I will continue to buy the school portrait photos because I’ve come to realise the point of them is not capturing your child at their loveliest, but rather freezing them in a moment in time, marking another precious year, and another, and another.
