Legacy MattersWhy do women hate photographs of themselves?
Talking to my friends, I realise that most of us have hundreds of pictures of our children, our partners, our friends, but scarcely a single one of ourselves.
My friend Helen - slim, attractive and stylish - confessed to me recently that she is photo-phobic. “From looking at our photographs, you'd think my husband was married to the au pair. If I died tomorrow, my children would hardly have a single photograph to remember me by,” she says.
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“Photographs aren't very representative of what we look like in reality,” she says. “It is just a record of one static moment. People are never completely still like they are in a photograph, and animation changes the way we look. In studies, people are often rated as significantly better-looking in person than in photographs, and that's because of personal qualities, such as confidence.”
Ironically, for all my dislike of cameras, I regret that I have so few photos as records of my personal history. I have scarcely a single picture of myself in my twenties, for example.
And oddly, when I look at old photos of me, ones that I loathed at the time I now think look fine. Where once I saw old and fat, I now see young and slim. So, tell me: why will I still be sitting at the PC deleting this year's crop as usual?