New Short Essay: Flash Captures

(Sorry, folks. My previous draft was fiction, so it had to be nixed. Hope you enjoy!)
I am terribly unphotogenic. Looking at myself in the mirror never scares me, but each picture I take elicits fear. Upon close inspection in the glassy echo, I seem pretty normal. Semi-proportional at the very least. But something happens between my causal reflection and the capturing of who I am on film. Picasso would have been inspired. Maybe even insulted. How did I whip that expression out in the time it takes the flash to register me candidly? In every depiction, I look unfortunately deformed. Each photo brings out a new ugly side of me. I peer horrified into the succession of images framed by the tiny L.C.D. screen. Monstrous masks obscuring my face in all representations. I don’t believe these are true self-portraits. They don’t embody my features at all; don’t correspond with the countenance I know. How could these horrid photographs symbolize the woman I have come to be? How could the visage in these snapshots stand in for me, when the visage I see has been shaped by my experiences, my years of changing expressions, my life?
My grandmother recently gave me a photo from when I was very young. It was taken just before my parents’ divorce and I must have been barely two years old. It’s rather poetic. My mother and father are on either side of me, all dressed up, looking into the camera. They are not so naturally posed and half-smiling. Forced together for the lens. Both hold me, arguing even in body language over their child. Between this, I am looking away. Something offstage interesting me more than the tangible contention. And I hold a cliche red and thorn-less rose in my tiny hands. It seems to measure the distant between Mom and Dad. The petals caressing the hollow of Mom’s collarbone and the tip centering on Dad’s chest. I seem so innocently entranced by whatever is outside the point of view. I have no idea what the future holds or what truth the camera reveals about my family. And I do not find myself hideous in any way. Just young. Unconcerned. I only now think that I am correctly characterized in the picture because of course, I have no way of knowing who I was then, and because I hadn’t had much character to be yet represented. I hadn’t been hurt or wrought by living yet.
This image has given me a new perception. More than exposing a time in my life that had been so vague and indistinct, it reveals why I found each recent photo of me so off-putting. No picture can personify me. A single still won’t show my entire lifetime. One image can only prove so much, can only render what is transferred by illumination so quick and sudden. It can’t speak of my journey to that point or why my features have set in such a way. It can only say in that moment in time, a fragment of me was summed up and depicted in this manner. So each example is not an embodiment of the whole me. But rather a distorted trait hanging out high and dry. Each flicker brings out what is inside. Sometimes it is ugly and frank, but all are real and a part of who I am. They are simply flash captures of me.