The last time I had my picture taken at my own request was in 2009. I was sorely in need of a new publicity photo, and Ken Howard, who was shooting the Santa Fe Opera that summer, photographed me in the auditorium, wearing my brand-new curtain-call suit and a vintage Givenchy tie given to me by Mrs. T that had once belonged to Virgil Thomson. I still use Ken’s excellent head shot–it will appear on the dust jacket of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington–and I doubt that I’ll have another one taken any time soon, at least not until advancing age transforms me so radically that I feel obliged to keep up with my real-life face.
My “session” with Ken came to mind when I read in The Wall Street Journal that Sears and Wal-Mart had shut down their in-store portrait studios:
The photographer that ran the portrait studios at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Sears Holdings Corp.and Babies “R” Us has abruptly shuttered its business, ending a long-time retail tradition–at least for now–at those stores.
CPI Corp., in a statement on its website, said it has closed all of its U.S. studios “after many years of providing family portrait photography.” The St. Louis-based company didn’t explain the hasty closure, and calls to CPI went unanswered. However, the company has struggled financially, hurt by the rise of digital photography….
Department stores have long offered portrait services at their stores. The studios are a place where family milestones can be captured, like a youngster’s birthday or a holiday picture. The studios also would bring in customers that could fan out and shop in other parts of the store.
Ann Althouse, who also took note of this story, thinks that it marks a cultural turning point: “We all already know what everyone looks like. The ponderous, formal recording of ourselves for posterity isn’t a notion capable of ever crossing our minds again. It will be snapshots on the fly from here on out.” I have no doubt that she’s right. Not only is ours a DIY culture, but postmodern Americans reflexively eschew any kind of formality save under the direst and most official of circumstances. Nor am I all that different from my determinedly casual-looking juniors. Nowadays my four suits mostly go unworn, and I can’t remember the last time that I put on a tie to see an opera or a play, save for the opening nights of the ones that I’ve written.
Being the sort of person that I am, you’d think that I’d get dressed up more often. I did in my younger years, never more often than when I lived in Smalltown, U.S.A. To be sure, small-town portrait photography had already tilted sharply in the direction of gooey full-color sentimentality when I graduated from high school in 1974, but I was a tradition-loving kid who had no wish to pose in front of anything other than a neutral background dressed in anything other than a suit and tie. So I decided instead to have my own senior picture taken by the Baugher Studio, which had graced Smalltown my whole life long.
Loy M. Baugher, whose daughter has posted a Web page devoted to his memory, was a staunch conservative who only worked in black and white and refused to have any truck with cloying location shots. No doubt for that reason, his custom had all but dried up by 1974. The Baugher Studio, not surprisingly, went out of business a few months after I graduated, and Mr. Baugher (as everyone called him, at least in my hearing) died not long after that. Mine must have been one of the very last senior photos that he took. It’s a good one, too: I looked just like that in high school, and I don’t look all that much different thirty-nine years later.
My parents mostly relied on snapshots, but they did pose for a fair number of more-or-less formal portraits. At one time they had their portraits taken by a once-popular Chattanooga chain studio called Olan Mills that now appears to be on the verge of following Sears Portrait Studios into the memory hole of capitalism. After that they relied, if memory serves, on the photos that were shot for the annual membership directories that were published by the Smalltown church that they attended.
The picture on the right shows with perfect exactitude what Mom and Dad looked like when they got dressed up for a fancy occasion circa 1980. I don’t know who took it, but the unknown photographer clearly went out of his or her way to ensure that their facial expressions were animated without slopping over into smile-for-the-birdie silliness, for which much thanks.
While I prefer to remember my parents in less studied poses, I like this one, too. Even after illness started to have its cruel way with their outward appearance, they were still a handsome couple, and it pleases me that they made a point of leaving their loving sons a permanent record of how they looked on Sunday mornings, back when the world was younger and–for better and worse–more proper.