My daughter is scowling in the photograph, no longer willing to force a smile for the irritating person who keeps insisting on another graduation shot on the front lawn.
But scowl or no scowl, I am keeping this one. Even though I demand upturned mouths as the family photographer — God forbid someone celebrate a birthday without appearing ecstatic — when I flip through a pack of 4-by-6 glossy prints, I am reminded that there is value in an honest glare.
My daughter’s annoyed face and her happy face will make it into the album together to document both moods.
So what will happen to the grimaces now that some new digital cameras promise to forever snatch away our frowns?
This is not a joke. One camera has an option that promises to alter unhappy faces into smiling ones, a creepy technology that seems to have sprung from the town of Stepford. That camera and another also have features that detect when a subject is smiling before automatically snapping the shot.
This technology is enough to make me glare, only you would not know it from my photo. Like everyone else on the new camera’s digital photo card, I would wear an expression whitewashed into an emotional range from glad to happy.
It’s as if the camera designers are emotional wimps who can’t tolerate dark places, much like a friend of mine. “Smile!” he demands, if he sees that you are not. It makes me want to smack him.
Life is pocked with grief and disappointment. Beloved pets die, you lose your job, family members get sick. You can’t paste a smile on that.
Some of my favorite photos are of people exhibiting raw, messy feelings.
One such family portrait is legendary. My husband and two brothers appear as young boys seated as far from each other as possible at the same dining room table. Each brother glares at the camera, reflecting his feelings for the other two and his general displeasure with life at that instant.
It makes you glad you were not anywhere near the boys at the time. But from a distance of some 30 years, the family now hoots and hollers over this photo. They even duplicated the shot with the adult brothers, since mellowed but still with traces of themselves as revealed in the old snapshot. It hangs in our home office.
My daughter’s eye-rolling irritation — caught in frame after frame — at my excessive documenting of her young life is also part of our family’s story. We’ve got plenty of those photos from across the years, her face displaying a symphony of rich emotions from glittering excitement to narrow-eyed impatience.
No doubt my finger was poised on the shutter button as I prodded her to “Smile!” But I’m glad she didn’t always listen.
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Marla Paul is the author of “The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore.”
