Pic your friends

 

 

How’s my new head shot? Ya like it?

 

It’s one of about four photos ever taken of me that doesn’t make me depressed. This is saying something. In order for a portrait to not convince me that a ski mask should be grafted permanently onto my face, the photo has to meet several conditions: A) It has to be taken at just the right angle; 2) It needs to be lit well, or else I look like some lurking, predatory sea mammal; III) I need to not be wearing a black T-shirt illustrated with a skull dripping blood from its eye sockets; and •), my expression has to lie somewhere between neutral and mildly amused. Any less and I look like a stoned burglary suspect. Any more, I look insane.

 

Credit for the photo goes to a dear friend of mine, who I’ll dub “Zelda” because I’ll probably divulge something inappropriate about her at some point, like her weird butt scar that looks like Don Rickles. (See?) I explained to Zelda my myriad photo phobias, and she replied that I was being vain. How this is any more vain than shaving or wearing a shirt is a mystery to me, but Zelda earned a reprieve from any criticism of her logic when she took the first decent photo of me since Halloween. And the only reason that one was any good was because I was dressed like the supervillain Rat King and scowling like a pro wrestler through layers of gauze and makeup. Come to think of it, something that goofy may have made an appropriate head shot itself, considering my tendency toward poop jokes and boob references. Note to self: Always dress like the Rat King.

 

Truth is, I hate posing for photos, and I know for a fact I’m not alone here. As a photographer, it’s often been my task over the years to take portraits of people who would much rather be eating a box of broken dinner plates, or watching congressional hearings on C-SPAN. I could always relate. And it’s perhaps that empathy that allowed me to make people feel more comfortable than they otherwise would have; a few soothing words, a reassuring joke, and they’d usually relax just long enough for me to grab a decent shot. Otherwise they’d bear the look of captives in a third-world dungeon on the verge of swallowing a cyanide pill. Those tend to not make stellar Christmas cards.

 

There’s nothing more cringe-worthy, at least for the subject, than assuming a stilted portrait pose. For exhibit A, I submit a particularly harrowing experience I had when I was nine, when I was photographed by a woman whose creepiness could only have been enhanced by a box of sugar cookies and a windowless van. Unhappy with my school portrait that year (a common enough sentiment), my mother took me to the local mall, always a mecca of fine art, for a professional re-do. I can’t remember if it was my mother or the photographer who made the suggestion, but at one point I found myself in a bizarrely unnatural pose, my right leg propped high on a footstool, hands folded over my raised knee, chin tilted as though I were a Civil War general surveying the ruins of some still-smoking battlefield. Even decades later, I remember myself thinking some version of the following: “I’m not Ulysses S. Grant. Nobody stands with their leg like this, except maybe superheroes and frontier cowboys. I’d better be getting ice cream for this.”

 

The photographer kept exhorting me to loosen up and smile – as if a fake photo-smile is in any way compatible with loosening up. That smile, the one found in countless photo albums and under endless numbers of refrigerator magnets, is something we work on and perfect over time. It becomes muscle memory; “Oh, someone’s taking my picture? Photo smile!” And we set our eyes and our mouths and our heads a certain way, and in doing so maintain some semblance of consistency, a branded image that’s uniform across complex webs of Facebook albums and living room walls.

 

But when you’re nine years old, you haven’t had a whole lot of practice at it – especially if you’re nine years old in the early 1990’s, before digital photography turned everyone into a seasoned fashion model. So every time I was told to smile, I’d stiffen up tight as cow leather on a baseball. Then I’d try loosening up, but lose the smile in the process, standing there slack-jawed like some stupefied ogler at a Vegas revue. At a certain point, the photographer assumed a rather disconcerting bedside manner, cooing at me in toddler tones and demonstrating the pose she wanted me in by straightening her back and bouncing on the balls of her feet. Any condescension I may have felt was overpowered by the fact that this bouncing movement set in motion a series of distracting undulations of her considerable bosom; it was like roiling waves in a thunderstorm, and felt nearly as life-threatening. As compelling as this was, it triggered a flood of terrified thoughts: Does she want my bosom to bounce? Is she flirting with me? I’m nine! Gross!

 

To this day, when you walk into my parents’ living room, you’re confronted by a prominent eight-by-ten of nine-year-old me, hands folded, face afflicted by discomfort and sexual confusion. And I never did get any damn ice cream.

 

You know why Zelda is such a dear friend? Many reasons, but near the top of the list is that she doesn’t make me uncomfortable, or distract me with unruly body parts. She also didn’t make me pose like an 18th Century French aristocrat. I stood in her living room, we grabbed a few pressure-free shots, and I was out of there in less time than it takes to say “Matt Lauer’s colonoscopy video.” Note to self: Stop watching the “Today” show.

 

Now if only Zelda could take each and every shot of me from now until the end of time, I wouldn’t have to walk around dressed like the Rat King.