A group of my students was using old yearbooks to complete an assignment the other week.
They loved looking for photos of their parents, seeing how much teachers had changed, admiring fashions at homecoming and looking at the records of various sports teams.
It was a reminder of the power of a physical medium in a largely digital age. Phones and tablets can hold many more images than even the largest yearbook, and the number of photos available on various social-media platforms is infinitely larger. Yet if I were to put an iPad filled with such photos on one table and a handful of yearbooks on another, my hunch is that people of all ages would gravitate to the yearbooks.
Part of the reason is the tactile sensation of turning pages. Books exist in the real world. They don’t require a password or a power source. The only way to zoom in is to hold the book closer to your face, and for most photos, this method suffices.
Books are also organized in ways that digital collections are not. Sure, digital images can be separated into folders, accessed by hashtags and arranged on the screen to illuminate a subject. In other words, they can be made to resemble a well-organized book.
I’m no Luddite. I love finding and sharing images online and scrolling through social media. Storing photos across multiple platforms helps to ensure they cannot be accidentally damaged or destroyed, unlike prints and books.
But still, books abide. And a yearbook, it seems to me, remains the best way to encapsulate an experience like school. It’s a common touchstone for classmates, a slice of history. While it can and should be replicated online as well as in print, a completely digital yearbook has neither the heft nor gravitas of its real-world counterpart.
Yes, physical yearbooks have a finite page count, so not every photo will make the cut. This, too, is part of the charm — the idea that you are looking at somebody’s judgement call about what is and is not important. It’s reality, but a curated reality.
Which makes it all the more disappointing to read of yearbook faux pas like the one in Bartram Trail High School in St. Johns County, Fla., recently. Students and parents there were disappointed to discover that at least 80 images had been altered to align with somebody’s sense of propriety.
Speaking more plainly, photos of many girls in the book had been modified to cover their cleavage. The alterations were laughably amateur — repeating a pattern from the girls’ blouses and dropping it overtop the allegedly offending body parts. Some of the people affected called it body-shaming. They also pointed out the double-standard of the boys’ swim team, photographed in Speedos, which escaped alteration, according to a New York Times story.
The yearbook’s bowdlerization follows an earlier attempt by school personnel to clamp down on dress-code violations. Now some parents and students at Bartram Trail are vowing to oppose that dress code even more adamantly, while the district backpedals and offers refunds for the book.
The school certainly had better remedies than heavy-handed editing. Administration could have given students an option to be rephotographed. An adviser could have cropped the photos more tightly.
Or — and here’s a novel idea — the school could get out of the business of policing how much of girls’ shoulders are visible on any given day.
By trying to cover up something that wasn’t an issue to begin with, the school has created an issue. Censorship often does.
When future generations of students at Bartram Trail look back at this year’s book, they won’t be looking just for pictures of Mom and Dad, teachers or the basketball team. They'll also be looking for images that were digitally defiled with a puritan’s misplaced zeal.
In other words, something they could easily find online.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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