The camera does lie after all as I hope I’ll find out in 10 years’ time

Apr 9 2008 by Abbie Wightwick, Western Mail

HAVING a new passport photo taken is a traumatic experience. It’s like having a 10-year-reality check on what I imagine is the same face I took on the world with when I was 19.

The woman in the photography shop lacks bedside manner and barely gives me time to run a brush through my hair before she’s waving her lens at me and turning up the lights to full.

“Don’t smile,” she orders, as if I had any intention of doing so.

How can you smile when you know some hideous image making you look like a lobotomised alien is going to be used for ever more as proof of your identity? Well, not for ever more, but a decade, and that feels like eternity when you’re lumbered with a snap like that.

It seems the photographer takes a sadistic delight in making her subjects look at best bizarre and worst, downright ugly.

The new age of high security passports means you have to pay someone to take the pictures because it is virtually impossible to work out the required measurement from the side of the head to the edge of the photo unless you have a degree in applied mathematics.

All well and good if it makes our nation safer. Except, I suspect that it’s still a bit of a hit and miss system.

My son, aged five, will soon be handed the first passport he has ever owned bearing a true likeness of his face.

Since 2003 he has travelled the world, unchallenged, on a document with a photo that could be any baby, anywhere, anytime. It is just a bald head, large eyes and a neutral-coloured Babygro. When I say “travelled the world” I’m exaggerating. He’s been to Spain, Greece and Norway and used the passport as ID for internal flights to Scotland. No-one ever said: “How do we know it’s him?” even though his only family would have been hard-pressed to pick him out on the basis of the photo provided.

When I point this out to a friend she remarks that my newly-expired passport shows an image of a youthful, carefree woman, minus lines round the eyes and salt and pepper hair. So it seems that I must race out and ask someone to take a truer image including skin without collagen, hair draining of colour and mad, staring eyes.

Like everyone else, I look entirely capable of acts of terror according to the photographic evidence.

I’d like to suggest that the camera does lie. For a fleeting nano-second we may all look as strange as we do in passport photos, but not always.

I have considered having another one taken before I send the forms off. But I don’t think I’ll bother. At least the next time I have to renew my passport I can console myself with the thought that I may be 10 years older but I surely can’t look odder – can I?