I have been blogging for some time – not forever, but for a while, off and on.

During that time, I have put some pictures of myself on my blog – not often, but once in a while.

Here’s one, for instance.

That one is pretty old.  Don’t remember those glasses frames at all.

Here’s another one.

Kinda the same.  Fuzzy, out of focus.  Ephemeral.

I really like those photos, because I really took them.  That is really (or was) my computer in each of those photos.  And I really took each of those photos with the (really cheap) camera that was attached to that particular computer at that particular time.  Those photos are therein, I like to believe, authentic.

Now I am doing this blog.  And somebody wants me to have my picture on this blog.  A marketing person, I think.  I don’t know who exactly.

So Harold Baquet, our University photographer and a person I admire, was assigned to take my photo, and, per his assignment, that is what Harold did.

I posed for Harold.  (It’s my own fault, really; I didn’t have to pose for Harold.)  So now I have a photo that is technologically and aesthetically superior to my old photos, and, since the truth will be told, I really don’t like my new photo.

My new photo, in comparison to my old photos, is more official and less authentic.  It looks and feels fake.  I think it is fake.

I said as much to Harold.  I said that photos posed and framed like the photos posed and framed on this blog – nice photos – would probably better go on a mantle or in a brochure or on a website that was trying to sell somebody something rather than on a website where somebody was just trying to tell the truth and be authentic now and again, off and on.

I don’t know if Harold agreed with me or not.  I really don’t think the marketing person agreed with me at all – because, well, there’s the photo.

So what do you do?

You try to tell the truth a little, off and on, now and again.  You try to be authentic.

That is what new technology is supposed to help you do, right?