Facing up to the photographer is not so picture perfect
My kitchen table doubles as my office, which is a perfectly adequate setup if you can tolerate a workplace where the resident cats slink on to your keyboard for attention.
They’re pleasant enough coworkers, but their banter is sadly lacking, so I took a jaunt into the Nelson Mail office recently to have lunch with some of the people who exist at the end of the email addresses where I send my stories.
Stu, the communities editor, suggested that while I was there, we might as well update my head-andshoulders shot – that wee picture that appears beside my columns. I gave him the same sort of hunched shoulder whine that emanates from my children when I tell them it’s time to switch off the television or leave the playground.
It’s not a self-confidence thing, I swear. My face is just my face, for better or for worse. It hasn’t launched a thousand ships, but nor do people avert their eyes in horror.
From my mother’s side, I’ve inherited excellent cheekbones and underwhelming lips. From my father’s, strong teeth and marauding eyebrows that, if they weren’t kept in check, would possibly stage a coup and overthrow my entire head.
My face is pleasantly recognisable to my friends (except Julie, who has prosopagnosia). Its parts are echoed in the beautiful features of my children. My face is fine.
I’m also not the person who ducks her head when people pull out their cameras (read: phones) to capture a memory.
I want those memories, too, even if it’s the third day in a row that I’ve worn those jeans, and my top has eggy fingerprints on the shoulder from where a small person used me as leverage to clamber down from a stool. Instagram probably does have a ‘‘mother of preschoolers’’ filter which erases food stains and softens the desperate glaze of exhaustion, but where’s the honesty in that?
There’s just something a bit more intimidating about having a paparazzi-length lens a metre from your forehead, with lighting umbrellas being minutely adjusted to best hide the enduring grey smudges under your eyes.
‘‘Ah well,’’ I conceded to Stu, ‘‘it’s probably sensible to get rid of the shiny-faced picture that’s running at the moment.’’
‘‘Yes, the light really did pick all of that up,’’ he mused, hugely flatteringly.
So I followed Braden, the photographer, to his makeshift studio space, dragging my feet and complaining that if I’d been given some notice, I would have at least toned down the glow from my red, snuffly nose. That’s a lie. I don’t really own any makeup, or at least none that is less than a decade old.
The wave of weddings that I attended in my 20s has slowed to a such an undependable trickle that replenishing my makeup supply each time it expired would cost as much as a Rarotongan honeymoon. If I have a couple of spare minutes in the mornings, I use it to brush my hair before shoving it into its standard mum-bun. The odds of this are 50:50 at best.
‘‘I’m not much of a model,’’ I apologised to Braden, who was already well aware of this, as several months prior he’d been handed the unlucky task of taking my original head-and-shoulder shots. This took place in the stark lighting of my Motueka hallway at the end of the long working day, while my overexcited pyjama-clad children ran laps around his expensive electronics.
He had either forgotten this experience or suppressed it, because he was kind enough to reassure me that I’d be fine.
Then he studied me with his professional eye. ‘‘You have a strap,’’ he said, gesturing at my shoulder and then busying himself with his camera settings while I tucked the offending item away.
‘‘Let’s try a smile with teeth,’’ he instructed. ‘‘Closed-mouthed smile. Now a serious one.’’
Beauty is symmetrical, and that day, I just wasn’t. After a few attempts, Braden wordlessly pulled out his phone and held it up to me on selfie mode so that I could tug my askew clothing back into submission. We tried again.
‘‘I’m doing that thing where I squint one eye,’’ I said, when we previewed the photos on the tiny screen of his camera.
He took some more. The effort of keeping my eyes symmetrical made my smile flatten at one side. After many dozens of clicks, he announced uncertainly that there would be something in there that he could work with, and my studio session ended.
The resulting picture looks a little like someone has dragged their greasy thumb across the newsprint.
Let it not sully Braden’s otherwise glorious career. He is a marvellous photographer. He’s had swathes of experience, and his portfolio is beautiful. He was one of only three finalists for Photographer of the Year at New Zealand’s Voyager Media Awards this year. That’s a really big deal.
I think he and I can safely agree that my profile picture will not make next year’s shortlist.
My face is just my face, for better or for worse.