Chapin Student Press Network

The digital publishing hub for Chapin High School

The digital publishing hub for Chapin High School

Chapin Student Press Network

The digital publishing hub for Chapin High School

Chapin Student Press Network

School Pictures Leave Lasting Impressions

This year as the student body showed up for registration day we got our books, our schedules, and we, regrettably, got our pictures taken. Now the aforementioned pictures taken at registration are proudly (or shamefully) hanging around our necks in the form of IDs.

Bad school pictures have been around since the first yearbook was printed. They seem to as inevitable as homework and tests. There must be something in the camera or the plastic step students are forced to sit on that mystically brings out our inner awkwardness. Sure there are a lucky few who pull off  the near miracle of a decent school picture but only a select few beat the odds to create a photo that is more than cringe worthy.

But why can’t we take good school pictures? No one really understands it. Whether it’s the leftover lunch in your teeth, the ugly shirt that mom picked out, or that half sneeze, half asleep look, the picture says a thousand words but most aren’t printable in this story.

Everyone has a bad school picture. Even if you won’t admit it.

Story continues below advertisement

 

For me, it’s my eighth grade spring picture- WITH THE PERM.

 

I was bored with my hair so I decided to get a perm. The pluses were numerous. I wouldn’t have to do much with it and my hair would be curly, fun, and cute!

I was wrong. So. Utterly. Wrong.

I was in denial because with a perm there are no pluses.

My hair didn’t take well to the perm and decided to fall out in the front, which left me with frizzy, dead hair around my face and a nice perm everywhere else. I had to pin back the hair around my face, creating a bump of hair atop my head and to complete the ensemble- crooked teeth with braces in a forced smile captured forever in the middle school yearbook.

But at least there were a few weeks to hope that maybe it would turn out okay. Maybe the camera would somehow make this poodle gone bad turn into a luxurious mane. Maybe the perm would look how I had hoped when I thought of it in the first place. Maybe the fates would be kind.

Alas, it was not to be.

My pictures came back and that moment of pure, excruciating horror is matched by no other anxiety. We all know it well. It is a bond shared by every school kid across the world. It crosses borders, racial lines and ethnic backgrounds.

Even though we dread the photo that will forever dog us, it has to be done. There is no way around it besides dropping out of school but sadly that is not plausible.

It’s something we overcome every spring and fall. Taking school pictures is like puberty. We all go through it together and we all grow through it together.

We cry at the time and laugh about it later.

Of course there is always the risk of other people laughing at you (the social collateral damage), but don’t be embarrassed. Be mature and laugh with them!

If your eyes are bugging out of your head and you look like Golem, laugh at it! It probably looks hilarious.

And that’s the moral of the story:  Learn to laugh at yourself because nobody’s perfect and we all have the proof in a glossy 8X10 in the back of our parents’ closet.

 

Leave a Comment
More to Discover

Comments (0)

All Chapin Student Press Network Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Activate Search
School Pictures Leave Lasting Impressions