Airbrushing our lives?

Recently someone asked why a photo had been used which wasn’t shall we say the best. This prompted me to start wondering ...are we airbrushing our lives and creating fake histories or just making the most of what we have.

We all like to look our best, or as near to our best as is A) feasible in the time we have to get ready B) appropriate for the supermarket and C) likely to happen when we can’t really be bothered. However with use of digital cameras we can scroll back through our lives and imagine we never left the house looking anything other than perfect. Conversely the opposite is now true for celebrities, once only photographed looking glamorous, now being snapped on their way to Tesco’s looking like *gasp*  a civilian.

Anyway, I digress. When I was clearing through things at my parents’ house there were boxes and bags of photos (no need for albums when you’ve got a Safeway’s bag eh?) it was the photos of my Dad with his hair sticking up on end looking for all the world like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ that made me laugh out loud, the photo of my mum, startled on a sunlounger that has made it as a coaster on my coffee table and the photo of my nephew and I as children eating toast and looking a bit vacant that is on my shelves.

Who knows whether these photos would have made it past the memory card these days? Similarly when I look back at my wedding photos, which are funnily enough in plastic bags.....I'm seeing a pattern here...I no longer look for bumps and lumps and double chins, I just remember the day as a whole.

 With time the horror of a less than flattering picture becomes a reminder of the fun we were having at the time. It speaks far more than a posed, bland photo ever can. Anyone can smile nicely in a photo, I’d far rather have the reminder of when Dad put his walking stick on my veil on the way up the aisle and pulled a little bit of my hair out.

Don’t get me wrong, I have ‘good’ photos up all over my house, I don’t live amidst a strange collection of gurning faces but if we erase all the odd photos are we somehow tricking ourselves into looking back and believing that we inhabited the pages of Vogue throughout our lives? I mean we’re not living in Hollyoaks village and isn’t it a bit sinister to refuse to allow ‘flawed’ pictures of ourselves? If not sinister then shallow? Isn’t there any room for the less than perfect anymore?

I have to own up to my own hypocrisy here, whilst howling with laughter at someone’s ‘ooh matron’ face or my own Worzel Gummage hair..... I will happily delete all evidence of the fat photos. Is it because a facial expression is transient?  Or is being fat the worst possible insult?