Can you imagine having a photographer snapping your photo all day long as you go about your business?  I cannot.  Well, I can imagine it, but I would not like it.

You cannot begin to know how many strange and unflattering expressions I make and how many awkward gestures exist in my repertoire unless you are exposed to me throughout the days.  You can ask my students, colleagues, or family about this and they will confirm that there are things I do that should not be captured and memorialized.  I would never willingly put myself in a position to have the breadth and depth of my oddity frozen in time.  It is bad enough that the folks directly exposed to it have to keep it in their mind’s eye.

I am thinking about this today as I received an email today from The White House about some new photos posted on The White House Flickr page. I like to look at those photos on occasion to remind me that the leaders of our country are at their core just regular folks like me and you doing incredibly important work.  The page is actually more about The White House photographer’s days than the President or his family, but they end up being in quite a few of the photos.  It is the nature of the beast when you are the President of the United States.

This is yet another reason why I will never be the President of the United States or of the PTA for that matter – my quirkiness and pores cannot tolerate the exposure.  I already feel like a goober in my best photos that miraculously turn out decent, if I was captured regularly in the wild if could be worthy of a frightening center-fold-out in National Geographic.  No one needs to see that.  Indeed, I don’t want to see that.

But I do look at The White House photos now and again and I smile at what seems to be real life and genuine moments within them.  That is what makes photos from The White House interesting to me.  I want to be reminded that those in the photos are like me…well, like me, but with better expressions and less awkward gestures. 😉