Does anybody like their school photographs?
The annual school photograph Photograph: Getty Images
Ah, autumn! Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and the sound
of children being forced to grin and bear it by the school
photographer. Home the hapless young come with their head-and-shoulders
shots against an inexplicably mottled background (Why? Does it help a
child to smile if he knows he is being photographed against a mock-up of
greying corned-beef pallor?) barely encased in flimsy cardboard frames.
All this for roughly the price of a mere three-bedroom flat in Notting
Hill.
Of all the many millions of things not to miss about being a child, this annual record of your failure to mutate over the preceding twelvemonth from ugly duckling to swan is surely up there in the top 10. My parents' own collection (re-inherited from Grandma when she died, who kept them all on display above the sideboard, on the grounds that she needed a good laugh every day) reveals my steady progression from bewildered, chinless four-year-old to buck-toothed, bespectacled, chinless 11-year-old, and then on through the pubescent years in which I appear as a slightly larger sebaceous smear on the lens each time, the blur occasionally pierced by a glint of heavy orthodontic work, until the record mercifully ends at with the sixth-form group photo. I'm the chinless (but visibly relieved) one third from left in the front row.
Other people will recall traditions which sprang up around the photographs' reluctant delivery home. The divorced parents warring over who got the big portrait. The tears and recriminations unleashed upon all those who had neglected to smile at the crucial moment, brush their hair before they stepped up or attend to other matters of hygiene considered vital by fussy parents, but not their offspring – or the harried snapper who had 150 of the buggers to get through before lunch. My sister came home in 1982 with one that captured beautifully the bogey inching its way towards her lip. It glistened above the sideboard for years.
Nowadays technology offers parents the chance to multiply the horrors they can visit upon their suffering young by converting the pictures into keyrings and other novelty items. Sorry, kids, it's the price you pay for living the digital dream.
Of all the many millions of things not to miss about being a child, this annual record of your failure to mutate over the preceding twelvemonth from ugly duckling to swan is surely up there in the top 10. My parents' own collection (re-inherited from Grandma when she died, who kept them all on display above the sideboard, on the grounds that she needed a good laugh every day) reveals my steady progression from bewildered, chinless four-year-old to buck-toothed, bespectacled, chinless 11-year-old, and then on through the pubescent years in which I appear as a slightly larger sebaceous smear on the lens each time, the blur occasionally pierced by a glint of heavy orthodontic work, until the record mercifully ends at with the sixth-form group photo. I'm the chinless (but visibly relieved) one third from left in the front row.
Other people will recall traditions which sprang up around the photographs' reluctant delivery home. The divorced parents warring over who got the big portrait. The tears and recriminations unleashed upon all those who had neglected to smile at the crucial moment, brush their hair before they stepped up or attend to other matters of hygiene considered vital by fussy parents, but not their offspring – or the harried snapper who had 150 of the buggers to get through before lunch. My sister came home in 1982 with one that captured beautifully the bogey inching its way towards her lip. It glistened above the sideboard for years.
Nowadays technology offers parents the chance to multiply the horrors they can visit upon their suffering young by converting the pictures into keyrings and other novelty items. Sorry, kids, it's the price you pay for living the digital dream.
