As I recall, when I was in school we had pictures done once a year. We would have a big class picture (through elementary school), and then a single individual picture.
My kids, however, in a period of photography being everywhere via digital cameras on cell phones, have pictures seemingly taken a dozen times a year. Fall pictures. Fall reshoots. Spring pictures. Spring reshoots. Yearbook pictures for clubs. Yearbook pictures for sports. Lifetouch individual pictures, also for sports. It never stops...we spend half the school year getting pictures made.
Is it any wonder that children today are completely and totally narcissistic? From the time they were born we were pushing cameras in their face. We wallpaper our living rooms with the endless official portraits of whatever year it was. We give them specially designed phones that allow them to take selfies. We install software on said cameras to put dog ears or silly faces or touchups on every picture. We instagram, facebook, shapchat, tik-tok their lives until they believe that they are truly the center of the universe.
Because this a blog nobody reads and I have no interest in doing the research, I'll just go from memory...but somewhere I remember reading that some cultures thought that taking pictures were evil because it captured somebody's soul. By putting one's image on to a piece of film or scattering it into megabytes of information, they no longer are themselves.
I don't know that we can go back...but somewhere we need to address the idolatry of it all. The decalogue warned about the danger of making graven images of God, but that no longer concerns us. Rather, we are more interested in graven images of ourselves. I wonder if this is an even more wicked form of worship...we got rid of God, and replaced him with ourselves.
