The Secret Lives Of Happy Photographs

A single photograph cannot be proof of a happy marriage. The Karnataka High Court reportedly said this to a man whose wife was seeking a divorce on grounds of mental cruelty. The man produced in court proof of his happy marriage—a photograph of their wedding. The court rolled its eyes, metaphorically speaking, and broke the bad news to him.

Photographs are famous for reminding you about the way things were. They can jolt you into revisiting feelings you had, reintroduce you to friends who once knew your every thought, and reacquaint you with the body and face you had then. They bring back people you lost and sharpen the blurry memories of places you visited in a different life. They can even remind you how the sun felt on your bare skin on a particular day. They have the power to conjure up every emotion from fear to desire to loneliness. They are a record of the perfect and imperfect moments of our lives.

These days our Facebook feeds are littered with photos of perfect families. Like with a marriage, nobody—except the people in the picture—knows the stories behind the photos. We are no longer surprised when the happy (on social media) folks announce they are getting a divorce. The more perfect a couple looks on Facebook, the more likely it is that their relationship is in crisis, the joke goes. The loving message and photographs my husband posted on my birthday earlier this month don’t fall in this category.

Photographer and movie producer Atul Kasbekar observes that in the age of influencers, the stakes of producing portraits of perfect lives are higher than ever before. “People make a lot of money off their social media profiles. There’s a desperate need to constantly look happy, sexy, well-dressed, free of all lines,” he says. “A filter or mask goes on when they show themselves.”

My favourite fake photograph moment is captured in a stunning black and white series of images of my bestie and me. We were in the midst of a bitter fight, but when a favourite septuagenarian photographer asked us to pose for him so he could remember us as we were then, together always, neither of us had the heart to refuse. It’s the best photo of us—heads touching, mirror image curls flowing out of the frame and extra big smiles hiding our real feelings. 

The court referenced a single photograph, but history has taught us that many photographs too, may not be sufficient proof that all is well with two people. The most famous and lengthy documentation of this is the legion of smiling photographs of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, starting with their ‘wedding of the century’ in 1981. “I think Charles and Diana both knew they were making a mistake when they walked down the aisle,” royal biographer Penny Junor has been quoted as saying. 

Breezy photographs aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia notwithstanding, their honeymoon that year was a disaster. Charles took along watercolours and a pile of books and preferred to spend time alone rather than with his new bride, to whom he had already communicated his lack of any great love. 

By the time the 1985 photograph of the Princess of Wales in a glamorous turquoise asymmetrical satin dress and an emerald necklace worn as a headband, dancing closely with her husband in Melbourne, Australia was taken, their marriage was barrelling into the red zone. 

By the next year both were having affairs. “How awful incompatibility is, and how dreadfully destructive it can be for the players in this extraordinary drama. It has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy,” Prince Charles wrote to a friend. It took one more torturous decade before they split. 

Yet, in all those years, there were some photographs that told the truth like no words could. Like the solo picture of Diana against the backdrop of the original monument of love, the Taj Mahal, in 1992. Charles was busy with other things and, months later, the couple announced they were separating.

Circumstances can change the way you view a picture, Annie Leibovitz famously said. The day she photographed a naked John Lennon wrapped around his wife Yoko Ono, was also the day Lennon was murdered. It became the last picture of the Beatles singer. 

Similarly, if you encounter the 1994 image of a fiercely smiling Diana wearing a now iconic LBD, more daring than her usual outfits, you are likely to do a double take. But the backstory is more impactful than the outfit, now famously labelled the ‘revenge dress’. It was a conscious sartorial choice, taken after Prince Charles confessed infidelity on national television. Diana showed up at the gala she was scheduled to attend, opting to let her dress be her public reply. It became another photographed moment that depicted the real lives of shiny happy people.

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.