Physical Perfection Required - even in school pictures!

No Boo-boos or Cowlicks? Only in School Pictures

By SARAH MASLIN NIR Published: November 19, 2010

Oliver Tracy showed up for his first-grade portrait with a crisp white shirt tucked into navy slacks, a striped tie slightly too long for his tiny frame, and not a lock of his sun-streaked blond hair out of place.
When his school picture was taken, Oliver Tracy, a Brooklyn first grader, had a scab near his eye, from a tumble while he was playing tag.In his school photo, retouching made Oliver’s scab disappear. But just above Oliver’s right cheek was a scab; he had tumbled while playing tag.
His father, Jahn Tracy, had e-mailed the school, the Bay Ridge Preparatory School in Brooklyn, to see if Oliver could take the photo on another day, after the cut healed.
Mr. Tracy need not have worried. When the big envelope of photos arrived, Oliver’s blemish was nowhere in sight. The practice of altering photos, long a standard in the world of glossy magazines and fashion shoots, has trickled down to the wholesome domain of the school portrait.
Parents who once had only to choose how many wallet-size and 5-by-7 copies they wanted are now being offered options like erasing scars, moles, acne and braces, whitening teeth or turning a bad hair day into a good one.
School photography companies around the country have begun to offer the service on a widespread basis over the past half-dozen years, in response to parents’ requests and to developments in technology that made fixing the haircut a 5-year-old gave herself, or popping a tooth into a jack-o’-lantern smile, easy and inexpensive.
And every year, the companies say, the number of requests grows. Joseph Sell, the New York area manager for Lifetouch, which says it takes about 30 million student photos a year, estimates that 10 percent of the company’s photos of elementary school pupils are now altered or, in the industry parlance, retouched.
Another company, Highpoint Pictures, estimated the proportion at 2 to 5 percent. The numbers go up after the seventh grade, Mr. Sell said.
By senior year, sometimes half of a class requests retouching, he said. “The media and magazines have exposed our marketplace to people that are well groomed and well cared for,” Mr. Sell said.
Lifetouch offers several levels of retouching, which can include a $6 “basic” treatment for small changes like removing the glare from eyeglasses; a $10-to-$20 “premier,” in which the teeth will be whitened or a cowlick tamed; and intricate, and more expensive, custom changes, like adding a tie or making short sleeves long.
What else can be tweaked? “There’s really not much limit,” Mr. Sell said. Mindy Cimmino of Wrentham, Mass., who owns an event-planning company, said she was initially aghast when she noticed a small check box on her children’s photo order forms asking whether she wanted retouching.
Then, two years ago, her daughter Delaina scratched her face the day before her third-grade portrait. Delaina was despondent about going to school that day. So Ms. Cimmino checked the box.
“My rationale was, this is not something that is part of her face,” she said. “I didn’t feel like I was changing my child.”
(The father of Oliver, the Brooklyn first grader, gave a similar explanation for choosing retouching. “It’s not like I’m making him thinner,” Mr. Tracy said.)
But Ms. Cimmino said she was stunned to learn that a parent of a classmate of Delaina’s had asked for the congenital strawberry mark on the child’s face to be wiped away. “That’s your kid,” Ms. Cimmino said in an interview. “You really need to think about the message it gives your kids about accepting themselves.”
Glossing over lasting disfigurements might not be a bad thing, said Dr. Bradley S. Peterson, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. “There are kids who have some substantial socially stigmatizing features that they want to tone down,” Dr. Peterson said. Doing so in a photograph can build confidence, he said.
But parents who choose to edit also run the risk of “potentially validating the concerns that it is not O.K. to be that way,” Dr. Peterson said. “In some ways,” he said, “even though they’re trying to help the child’s confidence, it could inadvertently undermine it.” Some companies have quietly offered retouching for many years.