Savage Words: Look at the camera, would ya? Or not.

I’ve got, like 10,000 photos of my daughter on my phone.

OK, maybe not 10,000, but a bunch.

And about 80 percent of them are of her not looking at me, or up at the camera. She’s always looking down, looking up, looking off into the distance.

“Isabella,” I’ve said to her a million times (OK, 10,000) with a scowl on my face. “Look at me. What are you doing? Why aren’t you looking at the camera?”

“Aesthetics.”

That’s what she tells me when I can’t figure out why she’s not looking directly at the camera.

By definition, ‘aesthetics’ is a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art. In the opening line of Wikipedia, it says ‘aesthetics’ is the branch of philosophy that studies beauty, taste, and related phenomena.

OK, whatever. Just look at the camera, would ya?

The fancy Internet also says people don’t look directly at a camera for an emotional connection, and cultural trends.

Again, OK.

I get that it’s trendy, and my daughter’s not the only one. She’s made very sure to show me different examples over the years. I’m not an Instagram or TikTok guy, but given how the world of journalism has turned to more of those social media platforms, I probably should be.

But Isabella’s right. Almost every single person on Instagram – her friends at least – are all looking away from the person taking the photo.

Looking down.

Looking up.

Looking off into the distance.

Looking everywhere but the camera.

She’s also told me that people do it so the shot can look more candid. But every time she did it, I told her it didn’t look candid. It looked like she was just staring at the ground, or the sky, or off in the distance behind me.

But again, she’s not alone.

I guess it’s generational. Of all the photos taken of me over the last 57 years, my guess is I’m looking at the camera in the vast majority of them. If I’m not, then it is actually a candid shot, and yea, those look good.

The only time there’s been a photo of me looking down was if I was looking for something. 

Looking up? Perhaps an eclipse.

Looking off in the distance? Perhaps hungover. I dunno, but I’ve never purposely tried to force a candid photo.

It hit home again last week when I was working on the fall sports preview for the Brandon Valley Journal. For each of the sports at Brandon Valley this fall – and there’s a bunch – we feature a photo of the seniors on each team.

For the girls’ soccer team, there are four seniors. Head coach Aric Spader sent me the photo late last week that we used in this issue.

And sure enough, there it was: the four seniors – Brooklyn Goetzinger, Brenna Haas, Mara Kaiser and Sam Stemwedel – all sitting on the BV bleachers, all staring off in a different direction. None of them are looking at the camera.

It made me chuckle, thinking about the countless conversations I’ve had with my daughter over the years, pleading with her to look up at me.

But the girls’ soccer photo is good. Really good. It actually draws you in a bit.

So I went back and looked at photos on my phone of my daughter over the last 10 years. Sure enough, a big chunk of them is of her creating ‘aesthetics.’

And you know, they’re pretty damn good.

She was right the whole time, and I just needed a nudge from the Brandon Valley girl’ senior soccer players to open my eyes to it.

At this point in my life, I’m not sure if I can pull off this candid, ‘aesthetics’ look. 

But the next time my daughter is taking a photo of me, I’m going to drop my wallet, or something, so I can look down at it. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll come off as cool as the 10,000 of her on my phone, and the one on the girls’ soccer page in this week’s Journal.