The secret of smiles.
The format for school photography is so familiar it’s a cliché. Grumpy child sits on stool facing cheerful photographer. “Smile!” “Say cheese!” “Come on!” “Turn that frown upside down!”
And if you get a real comedian you might even be treated to “Smile! It might never happen.”
Sound familiar? OK, we know that school photos of miserable looking children is not what anyone wants, but this approach is clearly flawed. Children go to school to learn, and every experience they have teaches them something. Including this.
By subjecting young people to this kind of short, sharp, high pressure experience we’re teaching them that they have to ‘look’ happy to make everyone else feel ‘happy’. Worse still, it’s not just about this moment. The photo being taken will record that moment and how they feel forever. The stakes can feel very high.
In the iPhone era it’s a pressure we all feel. Parents feel they need to document their children’s experiences before they are gone, and often an added pressure to share those images on social media. Children of all ages now know to smile on demand, no matter what they are feeling inside, to please whoever is waving the camera – often responding to bizarre, urgent direction from parents desperate to get an image documenting today’s fun.
This kind of image-conscious conditioning is not healthy, yet it’s something we all accept. The relationship between attractiveness and positive emotion is being constantly imposed.
That’s why our philosophy at pop-up portraits is ‘just be you’. And we want to help schools embrace this, working as partners in celebrating what is wonderful about photography whilst bolstering children’s’ mental health against the increasing pressures of a connected, image-saturated world.
It’s a child-centric approach, and one that is entirely at odds with the format for traditional school photography described earlier. Rushing kids through the photographic experience, pressuring them into conveying ‘appropriate’ expressions and emotions, is just not how we think it should be done.
Photography requires connection between subject and photographer. A degree of trust. We’re very good at establishing a rapport with young people, but it definitely takes more than 20-40 seconds – which is how long most schools allow a photographer for each photo. Is it any surprise that those smiles can look forced? Or that children often don’t remember it as a positive experience?
I used to dread having my photo taken at school. I knew the questions and comments my mum would have before the photo was even taken, and of course they always came out. “Why didn’t you sit up? Why didn’t you smile? Why did you smile like that? What happened to your hair? Why are your ears showing? Why is your face so red?”.
Children should be entitled to feel like they have ownership over their own image, and their own emotions. Whether they smile or don’t smile, they are still valid. There is no right or wrong, except when you force a portrait format onto a class with expectations of a consistent, uniform result.
If we don’t respect children’s feelings they won’t respect their own, or each other’s. A smile is not really a smile if it doesn’t come from inside. Children know that, and so does the camera – and the parent who will be looking at that image for the rest of their lives.
Everything we do on our school photography shoots empowers young people, giving them control over their bodies, their emotions and their image. And this kind of child-centric approach is not a ‘nice to have’. It’s an absolutely essential counterbalance to the world they are growing up in. We take it very seriously, and tell every child that attends one of our sessions to ‘Just be you’.
It’s a message we want them to take with them throughout their lives, so they learn a whole lot more from a pop-Up portraits shoot than just how to pretend to fit in.