Can't We Be Better Than This?

Caught this article on a Google Alert. It mentions school pictures in the context of the author's family and how photography was (or wasn't) part of their life. Another instance where we're shown how much room for improvement we have as an industry. Making it better doesn't require a PMA-commissioned task force, either. We just have to hire nice people, train them well, give them some time to take a good picture, and then deliver a solid value to our customers. Are we doing that?

Link to article, excerpted below.
Courtesy of the Columbia Daily Tribune, by Doug Pugh.

The only exceptions were the school pictures I was required to sit for each year from kindergarten through ninth grade. One day each year, we were all forced to stand in line and then sit in front of a pale brown screen as an old man blurted out annoying jokes before blinding us with a violent flash of light. Our parents were then encouraged to purchase, at varying prices, assorted packages of the resulting photograph, which were handed out to the class amid great clamor and eagerness several weeks later. While all of the other kids ripped into gigantic envelopes filled with hundreds of pictures of every shape and size imaginable, I was always left holding a miserable strip of paper containing three tiny photos roughly the size of sugar packets.

In hindsight, this was one of the few instances of my mother’s vehement frugality being entirely well-founded. For my birthday last year, she presented me with a framed collage of every single one of my old school pictures, which had somehow miraculously survived her voracious desire to throw things away over the years. When I was in elementary school, I was required to dress myself and comb my own hair every morning. Also, it appears I was not allowed to eat or sleep for months on end. The result was that none of my school pictures is identifiable in any way from any of the others, but instead a sad series of identical poses: my head tilted nearly sideways, a glum frown traversing my gaunt face, one eye open and one eye shut, tufts of hair and cowlicks shooting out in every direction.