The Baneful Photograph Habit.

Woodville Examiner, Volume 3, Issue 281, 3 September 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Baneful Photograph Habit.

No doubt the photograph habit, when once formed, is one of the most baneful and productive of the most intense suffering in after years of any with which we are familiar. Some times it seems to me that my whole life has been one long, abject apology for photographs that I have shed abroad throughout a distracted country. Man passes through seven distinct stages of being photographed, each one exceeding all previous efforts in that line. First he is photographed as a prattling, bald-headed baby, absolutely destitute of eyes, but making up for this deficiency by a wealth of mouth that would make a negrominstrel olive green with envy. We often wonder what has given the average photographer that wild hunted look about the eyes and that joyless sag about the knees. The chemicals and the indoor life alone have not done all this. It is the great nerve tension and mental strain used in trying to photograph a squirming and dark red child with white eyes in such a manner as to please its parents. An old fashioned album with cerebrospinal meningitis, and filled with pictures of half-suffocated children in heavily-starched white dresses, is the first thing we seek on entering a home, and the last thing from which we reluctantly part. The second stage on the downward road is the photograph of the boy with the fresh cropped hair, and in which the stiff and protuberant thumb takes a leading part. Then follows the portrait of the lad with strongly marked freckles and a look of hopeless melancholy. With the aid of a detective agency I have succeeded in running down and destroying several of these pictures which were attributed to me.

Next comes the young man, 21 years of age, with his front hair plastered smoothly down over his tender throbbing dome of thought. He does not care so much about the expression on the mobile features, so long as his left hand, with the new ring on it shows distinctly. If the young man would atop to think for a moment that some day ho may become eminent and ashamed of himself, he would hesitate about doing this. Soon after he has a gem taken, in which a young lady sits in the alleged grass, while he stands behind her with his hand lightly touching her shoulder as though he might be feeling the thrilling circumference of a circular saw. Uc carries this picture in his pocket for mouths, and looks at it whenever he may be unobserved. Then, all at once, he discovers that the young lady’s hair is not done up that way any more, and that her hat doesn’t seem to (it her. He then, in a fickle moment, has another gem made, in which another young woman, with more recent hat and later coiffure, is discovered holding his hat in her lap. This thing continues till one day he comes into the studio with his wife, and tries to see how many children can be photographed on one negative by holding one on each knee and using the older ones as a background. The last stage in his eventful career, the old gentleman a’lows himself to be photographed, because he is afraid be may not liye through another year, and the boys would like a picture of him while he is able to climb the dark, narrow stairs which lead to the artist’s room.

Sadly the thought comes back to you in after years, when his grave is green in the quiet valley, and the worn and weary hands that have toi!ed“for you are for ever at rest, how patiently he submitted while his daughter pinned the clean, stiff, agonizing white collar about his neck and brushed the velvet collar of his best coat; how he toiled up the long, dark, lonesome stairs, not with the egotism of a half-century ago, but with the light of anticipated rest at last, in his eye, obediently as he would go to the dingy law office to have his wiH drawn ; and he meekly leaves the outlines of his kind old face for those he loved and for whom he has so long labored.

It is a picture at which the thoughtless may smile, but it is full of pathos, and eloquent for those who knew him best. His attitude is stiff and his coat bunches up in the back, but his kind old heart asserts itself through the gentle eyes, and when he has gone away at last we do not criticise the picture any more, but beyond the old coat that hunches up in the back, and that lasted him so long, we read ths history of a noble life.

Silently the old finger-marked album, lying so unostentatiously on the gouty centre tabic, points out the mile-stones from infancy to age, and behind the mistakes of a struggling photographer, is portrayed the laughter and the tears, the joy and the grief, the dimples and the gray hair of one man’s lifetime.