Image conscious.(The Straggler)(portrait photography)(Column)

Having asked Mr. Langton if his father and mother had sat for their pictures, which he thought it right for each generation of a family to do, and being told they had opposed it, he said, "Sir, among the anfractuosities of the human mind, I know not if it may not be one, that there is a superstitious reluctance to sit for a picture."--Boswell, Life of Johnson

THE photographer's studio was in a suburban mall twenty miles away. We had to get there early, before the mall was officially open, because pets are banned during regular business hours. My wife's great discovery, you see, was a studio that will include your pet in a family portrait. Boris, our terrier mutt, is now twelve years old, older than either of the kids. They have grown up with him; he is a senior member of the family; it has not seemed right to have a studio photograph of our family taken if Boris cannot be included. This, at any rate, has been my standing argument against the idea of a family portrait, an idea my wife has been rather keen on, myself--see below--very much less so. Then she heard about this place. They take pets, too! You just have to get there before the mall opens! Suddenly my argument was without force or merit. So there we all were, peering through a drop-down metal grille at Bay Shore Mall early on Sunday morning, waiting to be let in by whichever security guard was in cahoots with the studio.

In the matter of portraiture I am at one with the Langtons. There is nothing supernatural about my own reluctance, though. It is simply that the camera is unkind to me. In person I am, as anyone will tell you, a handsome and charming fellow with a winning smile. I have penetrating dark eyes passed down (according to my mother) from a Spanish ancestor in the remote past--a fine lady who sailed over to England in a ship full of servants. My physique is of the lean, long-limbed English-aristocratic style--think Sir Edmund Hillary. If not quite movie-star material, I consider myself perfectly presentable.

In photographs, however, all this is cruelly lost. Who is he, this leering doofus with Alfred E. Neuman ears, round shoulders, and receding chin, squinting out at the world over eye-bags the size of mule panniers? Can't he afford a decent haircut? Doesn't he know how to sit? Is that supposed to be a smile, or what?

(Part of the problem here is that I cannot smile to order. It is said of ex-President Clinton that he can weep out of one eye. While I can admire this skill, I cannot emulate it. A request to give physical expression to any emotion I am not actually experiencing flips me into deer-in-headlights mode. What seems astonishing to me is that professional photographers, even wrinkled veterans who must have decades of experience in their craft, cannot grasp the ...