CSotD: The way we became the Matthew Brady Bunch
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Grand Avenue on the scourge of grandparents with cameras. Which could also be the scourge of parents with cameras, except that Grand Avenue is about a grandmother raising a pair of twins.
Whoever does it, there are adults who manage without a great deal of effort to teach kids to Stop, Turn and Grin whenever someone whips out a camera. They are, perhaps, psychologically stuck back in the Matthew Brady era, when photography required that everyone hold perfectly still for a prolonged period, staring at the camera until their image was properly imprinted on the glass plates.
Speaking as someone who has photographed, or tried to photograph, kids actually doing things, both professionally and in my private life, I really hate having to sneak up on them in order to avoid getting nothing but Stop, Turn and Grin photos. But, once the kids have been programmed, letting them see a camera means nothing but photographs that prove that the people in the photograph were in a particular place, rather than actually capturing what happened while they were there.
This is not art. This is evidence.
You would think that digital cameras, with the capacity not only to shoot a thousand shots but to instantly check what you've done so far to see how it's coming out, would encourage people to relax and be more willing to capture moments instead of playing Stop, Turn and Grin. But think again.
There's even a commercial for computers in which a mother manages to use The Cloud (because you couldn't possibly do this using the resources on your hard drive) to digitally manipulate a group shot of her family in order to completely remove any vestiges of spontaneous behavior.
"Finally, Windows gives me the Stepford family that nature never could," the pleased mother declares. (Okay, I added a word.)
I have an even better idea: Scan the kids' school photos and create cutouts before you leave home. Then, when you go on vacation, just take pictures of the scenery while the kids are having fun, running around, creating memories for themselves and generally enjoying being there.
When you get home (or back to the motel, if you brought your laptop), you can go to The Cloud and just plunk these perfect, smiling, looking-straight-into-the-camera shots over your pictures of the Grand Canyon and you'll have perfect photos: This is what the Grand Canyon looks like, this is what the kids looked like when they were that age.
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