Photographs may confound the viewer as much as they reveal, and if I'm not mistaken, that is at least some of the allure of photography, and is a justification for calling it one of the fine arts. I love the ambiguity of photographs; the best photographers (not including nature photographers), it seems to me, are the ones who can expertly blend the chance and mystery that are intrinsic to captured images with their own artistic intention.
Ordinary snapshots, yearbook pictures, portraits and so forth don't have that kind of "intentionality", but to me they reveal something about the personae, if not the actual characters, of their subjects. Go through any collection of American family snapshots from the 1930's to the present, and you will probably see some striking trends. Up until the early 1970's, people seem more restrained in photographs. The range of behavior that was captured on camera was quite limited: usually the people are posing; occasionally they may be sitting in an automobile, or swimming or engaged in some other leisure or sport activity. Nowadays almost every aspect of life seems a worthy subject for a snapshot.
Prior to about 1973, you would seldom have found anyone making a face deliberately at the camera, or being otherwise provocative (the exception might have been pictures taken in photo booths). There is nothing inherently good or bad about this in itself; it is just something that one notes in looking at family photographs across the decades. However, there is a troubling feature of snapshot photography that one can't as easily dismiss (beginning, again, around 1973 and continuing on up to the present) : at a certain point, people generally began to look awful in photographs.
This generalization is as broad as they come, but I can defend it easily if you show me your family pictures (if they span at least forty years). The pictures up to 1970 or so will have a restraint about them. The human subjects will be well-, if more conservatively and uniformly clothed -- their hair-styles will be old-fashioned, but not displeasing. Most of all, the people in them will present themselves with a noticeable reserve, one for which one nowadays might be nostalgic. For to look at your family pictures, from the early '70's onwards, would cause one, in many cases, to blush and to cringe.
Part of the problem was technical advances in quick photography that made colors more lifelike and the visual sense of the picture much more immediate. Of course, one can't discount the hair and clothing styles that seem so laughable with a little hindsight. But these aesthetic landmarks are not the real cause of what I believe is a terrible decline in everyday photographs.
I am convinced that we are the ones who ruin, however innocently, most of the photographs that are taken of us. We feel obliged to show a whole set of emotions all at once when the shot is taken; this often gives us a distorted or vulgar appearance in the resulting picture. We think it is not worth our trouble to maintain our dignity before a camera; it should not then surprise us that we appear undignified in most of our pictures. Our clothing is of generally low quality, with too many garish colors and designs -- our clothes don't come out well in pictures. We also never seem to mind being photographed, no matter the time of day, the setting, our physical state, our frame of mind; we could be much more discriminating in permitting others to take our picture. We don't pose as often, or as well as we should for our pictures; we are happy to be captured in a state that we would consider more 'normal', not considering that our normal, moment-to-moment actions come out appearing very ordinary when caught in an instantaneous moment in time. Our photographers themselves are not blameless either: they take their shots at awkward angles; they surprise us, and they take too many pictures of us for more than a few of them to be any good.
While we might, on an individual basis, do more to ensure that the ever-expanding photographic record of our lives should become more bearable for others to look at, the problem and the responsibility are beyond the reach of our own decision-making. Our culture allows us to show ourselves in public in practically any state whatsoever without anyone's disapprobation (let's admit that we have all benefitted from the convenience offered by this lax attitude at one time or another). But your family's picture collection is diminished by the many images it contains of you and your loved ones in a more or less disheveled state. I might have trouble convincing you that public places are harder to bear now than they used to be, merely because of peoples' appearance; but I believe I would have a better chance of convincing you of it by showing you your photograph.
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