Images

There is a framed photo that is always displayed prominently in my house. It features my parents on their wedding day. But it’s been doctored, so much so that they have been lifted off of the church premises and superimposed on a faded pink rose that is itself somehow superimposed atop a random lake. So to sum up, it is a picture of a couple standing on a rose in the middle of a lake. Perhaps not very realistic and even romantically, not the most idealistic of aesthetics.

There is a story behind this picture. At one point in our family history, we lived in West Kidwai Nagar in New Delhi in one of the government residence quarters. Sarojini Nagar was only a few minutes walking distance from the house. So we were often there. We always ended up with cheap clothes and cheap everything that is characteristic of visiting one too many flea markets but that is another story for another day.

Sarojini Nagar market also had a shop called Paul’s Photo Studio. In the days when we still had to take pictures on specialized machines called cameras and then produce the reel to developers like cavemen, we often visited Paul’s. One day, my father was talking to the man behind the counter. The man was enthusiastically telling him about the wonders of Photoshop and how he could touch up old pictures, colour the B&W ones, remove age spots off of prints and whatever else. This was how we ended up with a lot of our old pictures retaken by Paul’s. My father often looked for good photos filled with memories to “re-snap”. We have a bunch of those, like a nice coloured picture of my grandmother, and two very random ones of Mother Teresa and Billy Graham – three framed photos, by the way, that are also always displayed in our home.

One of the Whatever Elses that Paul’s boasted of was the ability to recreate photos in such a way as to make them magical. And fantastical. And all levels of wonderful artistic mastery. He convinced my father that if he could get his hands on his wedding picture, he would have a very satisfied client in his hands. My father, for all his cynicism, is also an eternal optimist and always been naively superstitious and believing. So that is how we ended up with my parents on their wedding day, standing on top of a random pink rose on top of a random lake. Aside from the ridiculousness of the concept art, it’s not even good Photoshop.

Dad sent my sister and I to go pick it up one day. We laughed so hard it offended him. Them, actually – Paul’s photo genius artist and my father, both. But what was done was done. Not only was the photo printed, but it had also been framed with the option of it hanging off of a wall or standing on a flat surface. We refuse to bury such a treasure. Hence the prominent display.

It often makes me smile. In these, the days of easy recording and editing on smartphones, we have not visited a studio – Paul’s or otherwise – in a long time. And today, in this carefully curated world of IG aesthetics, your impossibly long legs and noses that have disappeared from being too heavily filtered, not to mention Kardashian beauty standards that have come home to our pages superimposed on our faces, this photo is a testament to remind me that not everything I see in a photo is real.

And that not all edits are desirable.