Andy Richardson: Accepting the harsh reality that the camera never lies ...
Shirley’s nothing, if not honest. So when she looked at the photograph adorning her magnificent Weekend supplement she had one thing to say: ‘That’s not you’.
Technically, she was wrong – and Shirley is always wrong. But scratch beneath the surface and she had a point. Because the man you see week-in, week-out in the fitted, black Alexander McQueen shirt with chin perched on hand isn’t really me. The stubble’s grey, not auburn; the hair’s receded (even further, as my first wife might have said); the eyes are a little heavier from too many 17-hour days and the jowls a little chubbier, the result of my unconscionable consumption of beef dripping chips and cheese and marmite bread.
Shirley laughed: “It looks nothing like you.” And she’s right.
It’s not my fault that we pull the wool over your eyes every week by presenting a man who used to exist three or four years ago but who’s since moved deeper into the summer of his years. If every picture tells a story – mine says: ‘This was taken years ago’.
Shirley beckoned me closer. Look at this, she said. She showed me a picture from a dating app. It was her, or at least I thought it was. Her hair was immaculate, her teeth white as alabaster, her lips moulded from rose petals and her clothes straight from some Parisian catwalk.
“You look stunning,” I said.
She made a frame shape with her hands at the edge of her face? “And I don’t now?”
Classic man/woman chat. I’d offered a compliment and somehow she’d found an insult.
She showed me photographs of some of the men that she’d met.
“That one,” she said, pointing to a man who looked a little like George Michael circa 1987. “He looked like Ted The Plumber.”
“Then Ted must be a handsome man,” I ventured.
“No he’s not, Ted looks like a plumber.”
“Corroded.”
“Yes…. and a little bit leaky.”
Images of an incontinent tube-fitter flooded my mind. Oh dear.
“And this one”, she said, showing me a picture of Superman actor Henry Cavill. “He looked more like a hungover Jools Holland.”
“Didn’t he bear any resemblance to Superman?” I offered.
“Well, he had a squiggly logo on his pants.”
“Thanks for sharing, Shirley. I didn’t need to know.”
The internet can be a cruel place. And when you type ‘why don’t people look like they do in their own photographs’ the answer is witheringly accurate.
Cora Kwok, who, interestingly, has posted a photograph of a cat, rather than her own face, onto a forum, offers this: “When we are looking at our own reflection, our brain will go make up its own head-canon automatically, like ‘we are beautiful’ or ‘oh man, I am looking so good’…however…realistically, we are about 30% uglier than what we see ourselves in mirror, thus, when we get the pictures, we always find it doesn’t look like us. Of course, we also need to consider the situation that some people are not photogenic.”
Isn’t she great. And isn’t she right.
Why we choose to project an image onto the world that’s wholly at odds with reality is anyone’s guess. Social media seems to have forced upon us an ever-increasing need to portray an unreality to the world, which seldom stands up to scrutiny. It’s like we live in houses where the windows are perfectly clear, when in fact the window cleaner stood down three years ago; or as though our heads are telling us we’re still the same man/woman we were when we were able to run a 6-minute mile, when in fact we’re panting at puffing if we go at twice that pace.
Shirley had a proposition.
“Why don’t we take new photographs of ourselves now? No photoshop, no make-up (in her case, not mine). We’ll look exactly as we do now.”
We stood in front of the phone camera. Click. Click. And a weird thing happened. Both of us looked better than the manicured, polished pictures that other people know us by. We were more relaxed, more comfortable in our skin, entirely happier. How about that.
One of my favourite social media phenomena of recent years was the #MakeUpFree Twitter craze that lasted for about 11 seconds. Women of all ages, races, genders and religions stopped trying and relaxed into themselves for an all-too-brief internet moment. And the results were stunning, proving – if proof were required – that we’re always at our best when we’re relaxed, happy, easy-going and not wearing Rimel, L’Oreal or, in this writer’s case, an Alexander McQueen shirt.
So Shirley and I took a vow to keep things real and stick to truth – in our words, deeds and photographs. All of which presages a moment of change. Next week, I’ll be back in the usual spot – older, fatter and 30% uglier. Rock on.
