Yearbook photo part of your permanent record

It’s not something you think about when you’re 17 years old, but the picture in your high school yearbook is one of the most important photographs you will have taken in your lifetime.

It’s how some people will remember you. Classmates who are in lockstep with you as a teenager, then scatter into the margins, will look back at it and recall the way you grinned and how you parted your hair. They will turn to your face and hear your laughter echoing down the halls. That 1x1.5-inch square could be all they have left of you.

There will be plenty of more appealing photos, from studio portraits to spontaneous selfies. You will have better hair days. The light and airbrush will cover the blemishes. You will post them on your Facebook page, frame them and prop them on the mantel.

A yearbook photo, however, is part of your permanent record. You can change your dreadful driver’s license mug every five years and apply for a new passport, but your class picture on page 137 is a forever stamp. There will be no do-overs or retakes 20 years from now.

The camera shutter captures everything above your shoulders for posterity. When you are old and gray, your children and grandchildren will ask to see the curious, younger version of yourself. Sadly, for those who die young, many times it is the photograph that runs with an obituary.

At one of my high school reunions, our senior photos were printed on our name tags. Most of us would have been lost without them, trying to look past all those wrinkles and waistlines to place names with faces.

This past week, I spent some time reflecting on yearbook photographs. On Tuesday and Thursday, students from Stratford’s preschool through the 12th grade formed lines in front of the lens of longtime photographer Lee McDavid. (This was scheduled for Sept. 12 and 14, but those dates were swept off the calendar by hurricane-force winds.)

Lee has been snapshotting fresh faces at local schools since 1976. That’s 41 years, if you do the math, and he is often reminded of it when a grandparent mentions he took their photo when they were a senior in high school.

Some old-timers still refer to them as “annuals.” That’s what folks called them in prehistoric times. Now, when I slip up and date myself, the students giggle. (They also make fun of me when I say “typing paper” instead of “copy paper” or “printer paper.”)

In fall 2015, my first year of teaching, I gave my journalism class an assignment that required walking across the parking lot to another building on campus.

It was a humid September morning. Apparently, I forgot it was yearbook photo day. A group of ninth-grade girls pleaded with me.

“Mr. Grisamore, please don’t make us to that,” they cried out. “Our hair will frizz.”

This week, I asked two journalism students to write a fun piece for The Gazebo school newspaper. It was called “How to take the perfect yearbook photo” from a guy’s and girl’s perspective.

The young lady, a sophomore, laid out every detail from applying a face mask and whitening strips the night before to the finer points of jewelry and mascara.

The young man, a senior and a member of the football team, offered three words of advice.

Take a shower.

In this fleeting world of social media, where tweets are compacted to 140 characters and images are attached to text messages, Instagram and Snapchat with little staying power, a small photograph on a glossy page in the school yearbook could be considered a prized thing.

Maybe it is. And, if it isn’t, just wait. One day they will understand.

This story was originally published September 29, 2017 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Yearbook photo part of your permanent record."