Friday, March 30, 2007

Photo's, the real foe

I have this lousy luck with photographs. Whenever I develop one, I feel like just tearing them off into pieces. This is in no way to say I am done grave injustice in the photos as opposed to what I look in person. Just that, the camera hates and takes special effort to make me look even worse and like an alien to myself.

I have never fancied myself as good looking at any time and seriously improved my English vocabulary to define myself better while really not meaning good-looking, but less hurtful. I am certain that my friends would even possess a better vocabulary. But I make it up with how I carry myself and earn liberal adjectives like smart & stuff other than handsome. My wife religiously tells that I look good in some snaps. That’s the greatest proof of her love to me, to keep saying that for 16 long years. Because I simply stare at the camera as if, for generations, cameras and we have been fighting a hundred year war.

Sometimes, we will pick old snaps and say I looked great in it, as a consolation against how I look now in the snaps. But my attitude has always served me well and I have never been hesitant to shamelessly flirt and have a repository of pickup lines. Maybe the fact that I have very little to lose, is the confidence that makes me do that.

But, certain people are born for photographs. Like some of us say we belong to some Gothra, these people come in the Gothra of George Eastmann. A big lineage from him would have got created just to look awesome in photographs. Here also there are two kinds. One is the type that looks good in person and also in photo’s and some like our actors, looks good on films but scary in person. Any which way, these are lucky Eastmann gothra’ites.

They have their eyes speaking to the camera and it captures the very essence of the heart in that split second. And the posterity of the developed film is simply too good, to enable to run through what happened at that precise moment when they were being clicked. Like I read somewhere, the cameraman is the only person who can stop time. You are there, at that precise second and that never changes. And that light of that moment, which is a speck of a whole universe churning irreversibly, but providing its own meaning in a way.

And beautiful snaps are a joy to behold. The printed albums (the ones that are now dying thanks to digital photographs) are always a ‘walk down the memory lane’. My wife, my daughters, few of my friends is made for photographs.

Me, I keep my snaps in the attic. Atleast people don’t profess opinion about photographs of kids. No one tells that a kid looks like a monkey. But mine got screwed up there also. The one photo they took of me was in Full-Monty, that I cant even show to my own daughters. :((

I am seriously worried about another issue. This snap was taken in a studio. Don't know these jokers at my house carried me all the way nude to the studio or removed the clothes there. Can't believe them really, having done that photo cruelty to me, they are very much capable of doing this also.

1 comment:

sidwho? said...

I , unfortunately , cannot blame the photos for making me look hideous. They are usually just being truthful.:-(
You can take comfort in the fact that a person knowing you thru your photo will feel better when he meets you..
Alas! In my case the image is as much a sore sight as the subject