Yearbook Photos

Several times in my life, life as I know it has been handed back to me on a platter, after I all but gave up. This tells of one of those times. I wrote this shortly after my 20 year high school reunion (whose formal event the drama guild crashed - but that's another story entirely.) Most people who knew me in high school would never believe that I almost didn't apply for my yearbook photographer position.

As an adult, I spent three years supervising an elementary school yearbook, and I handed the kids disposable cameras. I wanted the book to reflect the way they saw the school, even if that meant a few blurry photos. I had them interview others and write stories. The book needed to be theirs, not mine. I'd already had the yearbook experience.

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When I started high school, there were two things I wanted desperately to do. One was be a member of the drama guild. I felt I'd accomplished that as a freshman, the first time my name appeared in a program, and, almost better, in the school paper's article about the show.

The second was to be a yearbook photographer. My camera was my most prized possession, and I felt (and still feel) that the unphotographed life is hardly worth living.

I spent hours looking through my sister's yearbooks. I knew them better than she did. I examined, critiqued, memorized. Yearbooks were almost magical to me. I wanted so badly to have a role in publishing one.

By the time I was a sophomore, I'd almost given up on this dream. I owned only a 110 camera. I was quite skilled with it, and took lovely photos, but it was still just a point and shoot snapshot camera. I couldn't imagine using it for yearbook work. I watched the school photographers, and they all had expensive 35mm equipment, camera bags and long lenses. I could not imagine our family's budget covering such things, even though I was the only child left at home.

Fate intervened. Our drama guild adviser came to me one day, asking if I'd share any photos of our last production with the yearbook adviser. Apparently, the school photographer had only a couple of useable images from the time he'd spent shooting the show, and he refused to come back. Someone had either offended him or he hated the show or some such thing; I don't recall. Word had gone around the teacher's lounge that a drama student took photos of every production, and the yearbook adviser wondered if they could use some.

For every show, I took character portraits of every actor in full costume and makeup, backstage or in the hallway outside of the theater. I also took a group photo of the cast, tried to get a group photo of the crew, and occasionally shots of the actual performance (although I was usually too busy working to do that.) I went home and sorted through my photos of "Dracula's Wives," agonizing over whether they'd be good enough and absolutely giddy at the prospect of them appearing in the yearbook.

I met with the yearbook adviser, more nervous than I'd ever be on any job interview. I handed her an envelope of photos, and she looked through them saying, "Oh, these'll be great! This is exactly what I was hoping for." I glowed. She'd asked for four or five photos, I think. I know they used three.

A few weeks later I ran into the same teacher in the hallway. I was still amazed that she recognized me. "Do you have any other photos of students?" she asked. "Sure, lots," I told her.

"Are they as good as the ones you already gave me?"

"Well, some of them are."

"Could you put some together for me to look at? We're always looking for candids to use in the book."

Wow! A chance to have more photos in the book! And I could choose photos of my friends! I didn't want to be greedy, or overwhelm her, so I went through all my photos and picked out about a dozen. I thought they represented some of my best work, too – nice, clear, evocative photos, with one or two people in each. I added a scenic photo for consideration for the end pages, where all the "thank yous" and such were listed.

A few weeks later the yearbook adviser stopped me in the hall again. Taking hold of my arms, she looked me right in the eye and said, "TAKE YEARBOOK next year!" I was absolutely on Cloud 9.

I was sure my application would be denied, anyway. The current staff had to approve any new staff members, and the yearbook staff was always made up primarily of the beautiful and the popular. Maybe, I thought, maybe they'd approve me, since I wanted to be a photographer and they'd already seen my photos. Plus, the adviser would surely put in a good word, I hoped. I was amazed and delighted when I received the letter that began, "Congratulations! You've been chosen…"

When the yearbooks came out I tore through mine, amazed to find that, except for the scenic photo, they'd used every single one that I'd given them. Suddenly, I was no longer afraid of being greedy or taking advantage – I wished I'd given her at least twice as many.

I wonder what my poor mother thought when I announced, "I've been accepted to the yearbook staff. I'll need a 35mm camera." Such a thing was not in our budget. My mother is resourceful, though, and always tried to be supportive. On my birthday, I received my first 35mm camera. It was made by Fuji, and was not an SLR – a camera that accommodated lens changes. It had a single, attached lens. It was not a point-and-shoot, either. It was not only much classier looking, a bonus for me, but you had to dial in the focus and film speed. It had only a few focus settings: one for 3 feet, one for 5 feet, one for 10 feet and one for 20 feet to "infinity." It came with a shoulder strap, detachable if you so chose. The film speed dial had all the common speeds on it, plus a default setting if you used Fuji film. Then, I guess, the camera could read the film and tell what speed it was. I loved that camera. Even today I remember what it looked like, felt like, smelled like – how to load it, how it sounded when it was rewinding. As with all important possessions, I polled my friends – "What should his name be?" I tend to assume that most devices are male. In short order, he was christened "Chester." "Because he hangs on your chest," someone offered. He and I became inseparable.

I ended up on both the yearbook and newspaper staffs for my junior and senior years. There wasn't too much staff overlap except for the photographers. Not many people, apparently, did what we did.

I freely admitted, even on my first assignments, to bias in choosing my subjects. I wanted to take photos of people no one else photographed. Yearbooks seemed to be full of the same faces, over and over. My sophomore yearbook had beautiful photos and a lovely layout, but even more than usual, you saw the same faces over and over. If your face is on half a dozen organization pages, plus sprinkled through the activities pages, really, did there need to be two or three candids of you in the classes and index as well?

My top three priorities were to shoot the theater department kids, the kids I went to church with, and then kids who were total strangers to me. I scanned crowds for faces I didn't recognize in the slightest. Short baby faced freshman, disenchanted smokers, the geeky, uncool kids – they were all favorite subjects of mine. There were approximately 2,000 kids in our school; I thought the book should reflect that.

Since the photographers didn't get to do any of the actual layout, I knew that having these photos used depended on the whims of the rest of the staff. Still, more often than not, if I took it, they'd use it. Sometimes their choices surprised me.

Back then color pages were expensive and therefore rare. Every year they were allotted with great care. It was a big deal to have a color photo in the yearbook. One year, our winter homecoming received color pages. When I was sent to photograph the game, I took all the requisite photos – the floats, the crowning of the homecoming queen, the scoreboard with a final score of us, 49, them, 6. I also took a photo of the ROTC Color Guard presenting the flags. On the high school social ladder, well, the ROTC members weren't very high. Plus, their uniforms were black and white – not the standard choice for an expensive color photo. Still, the flags were colorful, and I felt the ROTC members needed their photo taken more than we needed another photo of, say, the cheerleaders. Cheerleader photos were not scarce. I was pleased when that photo was not only used, but was the second largest photo on the pages, captioned, "Our awesome ROTC Color Guard."

I was also proud of a color candid that made it into the book's opening sequence. It shows two girls laughing – real laughs, not self-conscious giggles. One girl is wearing a shirt advertising a group called the Circle Jerks. This was not a mainstream group, nor was she a popular kid. I was proud of that photo because it is the only time the girl's name or face appeared in the book. It undoubtedly meant more to me than it did to her. She did not get a school photo taken, did not join any clubs, and probably would have been happy to be left out of the book. I was not OK with that. Her friends wanted a photo of her, I was sure, but I also wanted a concrete record of her for the rest of us. I wanted her there, in our faces, reminding us that she existed.

That was the same reason I photographed the kids in wheelchairs. Every assembly, the kids in wheelchairs would be parked in the same spot, on the ground by the gym doors. Some were special ed kids with learning disabilities, and some were simply not able bodied. Even though we all saw them there, at every assembly, I had never seen a candid photo of them in the yearbook. So, I took one. The girl who used it cropped one boy out of it. He had poor muscle tone and drooped in his chair, his mouth open, his hands clawed. He just looked a bit too different for most adolescent levels of comfort. I was upset that she'd cut him out, but glad that she'd used the photo. It was a way of saying that the kids in the wheelchairs were "normal," like the rest of us.

During my senior year, the yearbook editor decided that she wanted all photo captions to include the names of the people in the photo, unless it was a crowd shot – the bleachers during a game, or the parking lot after school. I agreed completely with this plan. It was frustrating to students when the index did not list every photo they were in. The index only listed pages where your name appeared, not necessarily where your face appeared. Some of the kids on the staff were not thrilled by the new policy. They wanted to think of funny captions, and would rather caption a photo, "Check out those pecs!" than, "John Doe shows off his pecs." The compromise worked well, I thought; the caption would read, "Check out those pecs! (John Doe.)"

Still, we occasionally ran into trouble when a staff member wanted to use a photo and none of us knew the name of the subject. Our adviser wanted strict secrecy about the book's contents, so no one outside the staff was supposed to know what photos were used or what the pages looked like. Sometimes, the secrecy extended even to other staff members; for instance, none of us ever knew what the cover looked like until the book came out. Trying to find the name of an unknown student while still maintaining utmost secrecy was nerve wracking. More than once I was asked, "Why can't you take pictures this good of people we'll recognize?" My pat answer was, "They (the students we didn't recognize) go here, too."

I didn't realize how often I'd actually said it until my senior year, when I was trying to help our editor identify a freshman girl for the homecoming pages. We knew she was a freshman because she was dressed as a clown. On one particular day of homecoming week, all the freshmen dressed as clowns, while the other classes had their own costumes. It was a good photo and a great costume, but nobody seemed able to identify her. The hat and makeup just made it harder. The poor editor was ready to tear her hair out. "I really like this photo, and I really want to use it, but I don't think I can unless we can find out who she is." In total frustration, she said to me, "Weren't there any good costumes on freshmen that you knew?" I don't think I'd even opened my mouth to answer before she said, "I know, I know, she's a student here, too." She eventually found a teacher who identified our clown as a Julie Brown, and the photo went into the book.

I honed a fairly "in-your-face" sensibility during high school – if I was going to do something wrong or open to judgment, I was going to do it loudly and in the open. I made my best friend crazy by not trying to hide the incessant notes we passed from our teacher. "I'm in the front row! Besides, she knows we're doing it," I'd tell her. I also made no apology for having the kids from the theater department appear over and over in my photos. Hey, at least I knew their names!

Sometimes I'd be accused of playing favorites even when I'd tried hard not to. One year I shot an entire roll of film on the soccer team, with only two photos being of my friend Andy. Out of four photos chosen for the soccer page, two were of Andy. I explained that to someone who'd been giving Andy a bad time about it, and he snorted. "Of course they used those two! You made sure they were the best ones!" I hadn't; those choices were a fluke, as far as I knew.

Photographing my friends started from a bit of a grudge. In all of my sister's yearbooks, the drama guild was allotted two pages. The year she graduated was the last year on staff for the drama teacher known for big, splashy, very popular musicals. I started school the next fall, and when yearbooks came out that spring I was disappointed to find that the drama guild had been given a single page. The next year, we were given a single page again. I still have the note my sophomore self wrote to my best friend after I found out I'd been accepted to the staff – "If they're not going to give us our two pages, I'm going to splash us all over the book!" "Us" meant any of the kids from the drama department: usually not me; I was, after all, behind the camera.

When I made the staff, I asked the adviser why she'd made the change to only one page for us. "We decide that by how many members an organization has," she explained. I found that to be a completely unconvincing argument. "Then why do the cheerleaders get two page spreads? There's only six girls in the whole squad! We have over 30 members!" I wasn't happy with that answer, either – "They represent the school." I learned to love the woman I had for two class periods a day and faced many deadlines with, but I still think she had a blind spot.

When someone specifically asked me to take their photo, I often did, but I also frequently explained that having it taken didn't guarantee that it would be used. Very rarely, though, I knew I could guarantee a photo would be used.

When I was a senior, my friend Allan asked if I could make sure to take a photo of him during a soccer game. "I've been on the team for four years now, and there's never been a photo of me on the soccer pages." I told him that I'd be sure to take some. Then, I received a request from the sports editor. "I'm doing a collage page for fall sports, and another for spring sports. I need a photo of each of the sports, and the fall ones have to be in color. I've got lots of color football pictures, and I've got most of the others, but I don't have any for soccer. Could you take a color soccer photo for me?" Could I!

I explained the request to Allan, breaking the yearbook code of silence. "It won't be on the soccer page, but it'll be in color. Are you interested?" He was. So, we arranged a day for him to meet me in uniform, and I'd photograph him kicking a ball around the school field. If he was the only one I photographed, he was guaranteed a color spot in the book.

I was a bit worried about the shoot. My camera had been stolen – an ugly story in itself – and I had to borrow cameras or make due with my mother's point-and-shoot camera until mine was replaced. For the soccer photos, all I had was my mom's point and shoot camera. I don't think she'd even bought it; I think it came free with some other purchase. Even with my camera, sports photos were tricky for me. I had no zoom, and therefore no ability to zero in on the field, whether it was a baseball diamond, track or football field. Without the ability to adjust shutter speed, I had to depend on the film speed to compensate for motion in the subject. In short, I had to work hard, and depend on quite a bit of luck, to get decent sports photos. I figured that I'd at least be able to move in close on Allan, since I didn't have to stay on the sidelines or worry about other players. Since we were shooting on the baseball outfield, not the soccer field (our school didn't have their own; we used a public field several miles away), we wanted as much of the background cut out as possible.

I took about a dozen photos, more than I normally would have if I'd been using my own equipment. We had a bit of time before the deadline, so if the little cheapy camera didn't do a decent enough job, I figured, I could borrow a camera and reshoot. The photo editor liked the photos, though, and chose a dynamic close up of Allan for the collage. I'm panning as I follow him across the field, so the background's slightly blurred and it looks as though he's really rushing the ball, instead of slowly kicking it around by himself.

Allan signed on that page in every yearbook he was asked to sign. In mine, there's a small footnote beneath the shot – "good photo, Sharon."

As a bonus, the newspaper chose another of the photos to illustrate a story about the soccer team. He's identified in the caption by name, Allan Steinberg. I was delighted that our little photo op gained him double coverage.

I was even happier after it turned out that he wasn't featured on the soccer page at all that year. The varsity soccer photo that year is an informal shot of the team members at the school, not in uniform on the field. Allan had to be somewhere else when it was shot (I didn't take that one) and wasn't too happy about missing it. Knowing he was in the book anyway took some of the sting out.

I always hoped that my photos would help all the students, not just a few, remember their time in high school. At my 20 year reunion, I saw that maybe I'd been able to accomplish that. The reunion planner made a poster to display at the informal picnic during the reunion weekend. To my surprise, every one of the photos was mine. There's a good chance that none of them are the photos I would have chosen if I'd created the poster. Knowing that I'd captured somebody's fondest memories felt good – even if, or maybe because, they were much different than my fondest memories.