According to the screen time notification I received on Sunday, I spent twelve hours doom-scrolling on Reddit last week. No single platform slurps up my downtime like Reddit. True though it is that big chunks of that time are in bed after naps or holding planks on a yoga mat, I am fully aware that I waste time going down the message board apps’s many rabbit holes.
Outside of occasional responses to posts about Taylor Swift, the movie Past Lives, or the Oakland Athletics, I rarely comment. I upvote generously, downvote reluctantly, and, explaining several of those squandered hours, I do, in fact, read the linked articles. Reddit has become my initial source for news, but also an arena for exercising my disinformation and sensationalism censors between sessions of work.
I’ve already mentioned my favorite subreddits, but posts relevant to them command only a fraction of my time. Indeed: far more often than defending sincerity in “betty” or shredding callous remarks by Rob Manfred, I am getting lost in decidedly niche communities.
My favorite, bar none, is r/estoration. Alongside a clever name that earns it bonus points, this subreddit drew me in for its charitable foundation. Basically: people with limited digital art skills post in r/estoration in search of support. They enter with decaying shots of great uncles or blurry candids of recently-deceased best friends and seek assistance with improving the photos. Within minutes, Photoshop experts have donated their time and talent toward better mementos.
Whereas the average random subreddit I follow stokes some kind of despondency about the world, r/estoration is packed with people doing one another kindnesses. On even the most deteriorated photo post, one click will reveal—no exaggeration—a dozen attempts at brushing up the image. OPs always have numerous impressive images to choose from. While the best work typically yields tips, a spirit of universal empathy reigns equally often. It’s not uncommon to see responders refuse compensation or random commenters insist they’re covering a time-consuming restoration’s costs for the bereaved.
Digital though they are, miracles transform lost media into keepsakes every day there. I love it. Some weeks I lose four or five hours marveling at threads, admiring handiwork and community cheer alike.
The Reddit algorithm doesn’t understand that my draw is the altruism, though. It sees me engrossed in Adobe-craft and nudges other related communities in my direction. The biggest beneficiary is r/PhotoshopRequest, a subreddit centered on the same fundamental task as r/estoration but with a major caveat: the work in r/PhotoshopRequest is neither free nor restoration-focused.
In r/PhotoshopRequest, users post pictures with requests for alterations. Some submissions are pure gags—“Put my panicking cat on a rollercoaster”—but most involve clearing out accidental photobombers or cleaning up group photos into solo shots suitable for passports. Because I explore these threads with gusto, I get to see the fantastic technical handiwork of r/estoration at work here as well. I can’t argue that seeing an infant Photoshopped onto a brontosaurus’ back matches the reward of fixing creased images of WWI veterans, but witnessing displays of technical prowess still entertains me.
That amusement shortcircuits when a specific sub-genre of solicitation appears. These days, I encounter it more and more often.
The jobs in question center around removing not anonymous strangers but familiar faces. Most come from users asking for the removal of ex-partners or adulterous fiancées, leaving solo shots of betrayed individuals on gorgeous beaches or below memorable landmarks. Still, others simply want to remove acquaintances or annoying coworkers from group shots to better emphasize particular people. For paltry tips, the Photoshop wizards comply.
There’s a little too much Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in these requests for me, but sheer curiosity nonetheless draws me in. How will the artist extricate a person front and center? How convincing will that replacement kneecap be?
I regret my every exploration. Scrolling between exemplar offerings and the original, I can’t avoid ambivalence. Why does a person want this photo with their ex at the Eiffel Tower revised into a solo shot? They weren’t in France alone! How will they overcome the cognitive dissonance between that modified image and their memories of a shared experience? What would the altered photo even represent?
Ruminations on randos’ photos shouldn’t linger in my busy mind, but they often do. I find myself wondering about the scenarios that lead to such requests. What did the vanished do to them? Hell: what did they do to the person they’re buying out of their personal histories?
Sometimes, though, my unease begins closer to home:
What if I stumble across a post in r/PhotoshopRequest and it is me some user wants erased?
*****
My favorite quarter of high school, bar none, was the first one of my senior year. Off-campus, I had a job I liked, I coached a fall baseball team to a winning record, and I was writing online. Meanwhile at school, I had a fantastic schedule featuring lively discussion in AP Spanish, team-ups with Kayte on AP Lit projects midday, and songs with Vocal Ensemble as the perfect capper. I looked forward to school most days.
Furthering that feeling, though, were my lunchtime accommodations. Lunch was never my favorite time at school up to that point. Turkey sandwich aside, I typically drifted between the fringes of eclectic groups populated by friends of friends. For every quarter I spent in a welcoming classroom like Richmond’s with friends, there were five where I lingered by some hacky-sackers or sat alone against a building.
That first quarter of senior year was different. However it happened, I shared the period with three friends. Abe and David had been buddies since third grade; Derek had been a constant since sophomore year Biology. I knew those guys; I liked being around them.
Finding each other that first week, we settled in a spot tucked behind the lockers next to a vacant vending machine nook. Notable only for the protruding gas meter that occasionally betrayed its purpose with a not-wholly-unpleasant odor, we christened it Gas Leak Corner and ate there each day.
The spot left us mostly undisturbed, which meant open dialogue and big laughs. Our conversations featured plenty of profanity but also an unbridled enthusiasm for every topic that arose. One day we might tease Derek about Cross-Country by suggesting enhancements to increase spectatorship—hungry wild animals in pursuit centered our top proposal—while another might bring speculation about what we would do in various jobs. There was a lunch period, for instance, when Abe insisted he would, if ever a teacher, relish making up some benign fact and treating it persistently like unremarkable truth all year. (If that sounds at all familiar: yes, my annual invocation of Magillicutty pays tribute to that conversation.)
It suffices to say that I had a blast each day with them. Even when their edginess eclipsed my own, I thrilled sharing that space with them. I knew where I was meant to be each day during fifth period. Gas Leak Corner was our place. Guest stars, be they Richmond or the sophomore girls from the Cross-Country team, might drop by, but it was just the four of us in that spot for thirty unfiltered minutes.
Until it wasn’t anymore. One day, I noticed a kid sitting by the math building twenty feet away. We were loud enough that he could definitely hear us, a fact which gave me some pause at first, but soon my discomfort eased. Gas Leak Corner was our spot, the site where a quartet of seniors planted their flag. This guy was some scrawny ninth-grader. He was no bother or threat to us.
A few days later, that same kid relocated to the edge of the lockers ten feet away. Munching quietly from his cardboard tray, he never said a word, but his proximity was too noticeable to ignore. I tried not to glance his way, to ignore that he had moved closer to us in a manner that had to be intentional, but I felt slightly exposed in a place that once felt impenetrable.
One day, while we talked brashly and he nibbled at a limp taco, David cracked some ridiculous joke. My eyes momentarily landed on the kid as David arrived at his punchline, and before I could join the chorus of chuckles, the kid snorted out a loud laugh.
None of the guys said anything, but the kid’s eyes met mine for a moment. They showed alarm.
The next week, a lunch period reached its midpoint, and the kid hadn’t shown up. Thinking I had been the only one aware of him, I left his absence unobserved, but Derek brought it up out of nowhere.
“Is no one gonna say anything about that kid being gone?”
Turns out all four of us were wholly aware of his presence, but no one knew anything about him. We hypothesized what his whole deal was in our usual manner, but the next day, Abe reported that our kid was actually in the science class he TA’d for. His name was Maurice. Scouting revealed a quiet, mostly solitary classroom presence too.
Nobody submitted a proposal to invite him over or anything, but there was begrudging affection for this rando. When he reappeared a few days later, a choice line by Abe prompted a loud, mid-chew laugh by the kid. We all turned to look at him, prompting him to freeze save for the comically audible swallowing down of some food in his mouth. With a bemused chuckle, Abe spoke for us:
“Well, c’mon, guy,” he said. “Get over here.”
The kid’s face flashed glee before he composed himself and strutted immediately over. We all shifted slightly to make room for him in our circle before resuming our conversation.
For the next six weeks, Maurice was right there with us every day. I can’t remember a single time he said more than a few words, but he nodded along with whatever was said, laughing with relish while working through his food or sharing some of ours. Even when inside joke-zingers that dated back to middle school birthday parties flew right and left, Maurice laughed the knowing laughs of someone who totally got that reference, no need to explain it whatsoever.
As the final week approached, I caught the sense of an ending. Senior schedules were far too chaotic to count on aligning ever again; it was conceivable our off periods might never align again. So it was that I stashed a camera in my backpack on the last lunch before finals and asked the group to pose for a picture.
I’m sure my sentimentality grated, but everyone shrugged in agreement. As luck would have it, just as the bell rang, Richmond appeared and offered to shoot it for us. So it was that, in the defining photo from my time in high school, even the photographer was important to me.
We spent only nine weeks together in Gas Leak Corner; our schedules never aligned again. Thanks to that photograph, though, I remember the best times I spent with three long-time friends from high school.
And some random kid named Maurice.
******
Radically altering images is something I do so often that I don’t even think about it anymore.
Making the weekly artwork for this newsletter is a product of my limited skill. The origin of every image is always the same: I take a series of photographs and cobble them together with stock images and patterns found online. Because I use PowerPoint rather than Photoshop and make no money from this endeavor, I overlook the copyright ramifications. I’m just an amateur messing around to create bizarre headers for a personal writing project.
There have been formalized tasks wherein I’ve actually needed to perform with this skill set. In 2017, I was still making the AVID end-of-year slideshows, a process that demanded full-class photos for each group. When I took one of their class pictures, two students were absent. Thus, one day later, I returned, posed the two stragglers, and then added them into the original.
The result was some of my finest work. Unless you were on the prowl for something suspicious, you weren’t going to notice my forgery. I remember being proud when, upon presenting the photo, the teacher’s eyes went wide with excited disbelief.
That project was nothing more than “fixing” a class picture. I gave no thought to the idea that I had altered history. Why would I? Two students’ schedules kept them out, so I stitched them in to rectify what logistics had made impossible. The class could then be remembered as whole. No big deal.
Despite my firm footing, those tentative steps betray the presence of a slippery slope. Under my watch, their class photo became fiction, evoking a moment of unity that never transpired. When members of that class glance at that photo, it likely escapes them that the scene has been distorted.
As the month of June closed, Evan Puschak (@Nerdwriter1) posted a short video on YouTube provocatively titled “Will AI change our memories?”
Throughout his piece, Puschak explores the greater philosophical implications of AI-powered editing tools like Google’s Magic Eraser and Photoshop’s Generative Fill that make radically altering images possible in mere clicks. In particular, he contemplates how these tools have changed the function of photography on the whole.
At one time, we thought of photography as a way to capture accurate representations of the world, a way to freeze time in snapshots that we could revisit to see what things, what we, looked like in the past. With the arrival of camera phones and Instagram, simple editing tools and filters of all kinds, photography became less about the past and more about the present…
Since the rainy day I brought my mom’s old camera to first grade, I’ve seen the essence of a photograph as a permanent pause button. Snapping a photo lets me preserve a segment of time. Through photos, I can travel through time back to a day when that person was that size. The square images from my first photography venture lead off my one and only photo album, which is to say: they are exactly where 1993 me imagined they would one day be.
Puschak’s point is valid, though; we’re no longer looking at photos primarily as portals to the distant past. While we might hope the most important ones survive to safeguard special times for nostalgic moments to be named later, there’s a more immediate purpose now. How often does any snapshot escape its HEIC digital existence? Photos today are meant to be shared immediately and then removed to clear space for subsequent waves.
Given that fleeting nature, why would someone share anything less than a perfectly rendered shot? Others’ attention is finite; storage space is expensive. Photo-editing tools facilitate immediate refinement…which opens the trash bin for every subpar shot. Whereas my first camera offered its only feedback a week later when my film roll got developed, today I press a digital button fifteen times and pick out the winner minutes later. Even before applying any touch-up, I am selectively framing the past.
Thought-provoking though his comments on photography’s evolution are, Puschak’s greater point is more about memory and how these simple tools impact our recollection of what came before.
Human memory [is] inaccurate…Memory distorts the past according to the needs of the present. Human beings are constantly making a narrative of their lives, writing and rewriting the story of who they are.
This…healthy process…forge[s] a coherent, continuous sense of self. That said…there is a truth about the past that exists independently of our recollection of it. Part of photography’s function is to preserve that truth, to put down anchors…and prevent our minds from drifting too far from what actually happened.
Although his video takes a turn from there to probe the inherent selectivity of camera work, it’s this insight that I keep returning to. I am wholly aware of my memory’s imperfection. While writing this newsletter, I ascribe retroactive narratives to situations that lacked them at the time. As I age further from the pivotal moments of my youth, I consolidate memories to hug emergent arcs. Although their cores remain the same, details naturally grow murky and timelines inevitably shift. It’s not intentional; I was shocked when I wrote the story of Fuzzy and discovered the song I remembered us singing in the car one exhilarating night actually released five months later. I let that fact slide; the truth of that moment was present in spite of my faulty recollection. I learned to accept impressionism’s imperfections as the cost of evoking a greater meaning.
But writing and photography are different. The latter is, by its very nature, meant to preserve. I love Puschak’s line about how photos “anchor [and] prevent our minds from drifting” because it speaks to the dissonance between photography and photo editing: one grounds remembering in the truth, while the other disguises fiction with a facsimile of it.
Before watching Puschak’s video eight times this morning, I browsed through my Reddit feed until I landed in an r/PhotoshopRequest post. In it, a striking man stood next to an attractive woman on the deck of an observatory. Behind them stretched a glorious scene with a tree-covered peninsula, a channel of rippling ocean water, and a majestic Ferris wheel. Everything was framed perfectly, with the woman’s bag positioned to leave the Ferris wheel undisturbed.
The title of the post?
Tip to remove the woman. Thank you :)
The wizards in the subreddit executed their handiwork within an hour, and soon the poster had his requested image. Several submissions nailed the task, an especially impressive feat because the erasure target obscured one of the man’s arms. Multiple artists created convincing representations of that invisible limb that had previously been busy resting lovingly on her hip.
My favorite reconstruction featured that magic, too, but unlike the centered top picks, it never re-framed the man’s position from the right side of the frame. Unknowing eyes would presume the man had stepped aside to emphasize the gorgeous geography behind him; to mine, though, the vanished woman’s essence remained. Nothing indicated she was, or had ever been, present with him, but my brain auto-filled her body into the shot nonetheless.
It’s a fantastic photo, both before and after. The incredible background deserves attention—I’m sure of that. Hours later, I’m still curious about where it was taken. But regarding any edition still induces an odd discomfort even beyond the voyeurism of speculating about strangers.
How long it will take before his memory catches up to the photo and omits her presence from that striking scene?
*****
My time in Gas Leak Corner mattered to me because it stood in such sharp contrast to so much of high school. Other than the 85 minutes each day I spent in Vocal Ensemble, moments of belonging were rare. People accepted my presence rather than invited it; I was liked by almost everyone but embraced by virtually no one. There was a reason Kayte always drew my affection: she alone went out of her way to include me.
Those nine weeks in Gas Leak Corner were the only time I knew where, definitively, I belonged. Alongside two buddies I’d had sleepovers with dating back to elementary school and a third who’d been there for some of my favorite moments at school, the place felt different. It was an innocuous, purposeless space, but a space seemingly carved out just for us. It’s the part of Laguna I still remember best because it was the one area I shared with three of my closest friends.
Maurice’s presence was, therefore, ancillary. Just some kid who’d slowly inched forward until he was chewing alongside four seniors, he was someone I spent six weeks standing next to but who never crossed my path again. I only know his last name from searching the yearbook.
When I look at our photo, I can’t help but see Maurice on the far left and wonder about how many people in my shoes today would just remove the guy, treating him just like the random coworker who snuck into a family photo because it was too awkward to ask them to step aside. How many people would shrug off his presence and just fix it in post? Some design major with a student subscription to Adobe could secure quick coffee money rectifying his intrusion and preserving the intended memory.
I totally understand the logic of removing extraneous people from a picture. I’m a perfectionist through and through who relishes those rare instances when a photograph truly captures what I want it to. Moreover: that little boy who brought a boxy silver camera with a massive four-use flash bulb to first grade would be amazed at digital photography. Instead of blown-out, blurry shots of Julia, Matt, and Zach headlining a dingy blue album, there would be crystal-clear, well-cropped representations of my childhood friends three decades later.
But there’s also a part of me that can’t fathom removing an actual person from a photograph. Don’t get me wrong: do what you want with your photos. They’re your photos! I have no idea what went down between the Redditor and the erased woman, but I’m generous enough to want him happy. If removing the digital footprint of some ex-lover accomplishes that, more power to him. My judgment here is rendered only hypothetically. I’m speaking only for myself.
More specifically, I’m thinking about Maurice. The kid was a rando all the way, some freshman who just happened upon us. He made no waves among our quintet. He didn’t interfere in the least with any conversation or gag. He diminished not even one of what ended up being my final meaningful moments with three friends.
On the contrary: Maurice may have been the most sensational element of our time in Gas Leak Corner. That a scrawny freshman would inch toward us until he was in our circle, laughing about inside jokes he was technically outside, amuses me. Without Maurice, we were just four guys eating lunch behind the lockers.
In most eyes, the four of us were uncool, average people, but to Maurice, we were a huge deal. We were the older guys who invited him into their club, no questions asked. We were powerful dudes to him—and I swear we felt that way with him there. There was something validating about the kid’s desire to join us that elevated the entire experience. He gave our humble spot a wrinkle that separated it from everywhere else. He made those memories feel bigger.
When I look at our photo, which I still often do, I can absolutely feel Gas Leak Corner. It has become a magical place in my memory, a hallowed ground rather than some marginal parcel of concrete. How could I not recall those times fondly when a kid who didn’t know us was so eager to be a part of them? The rando on the side isn’t just some freshman who slipped into our circle but persuasive permission for me to gild those fading moments with meaning.
Truth be told, what I love most about the photo is him. Honestly. When I handed Richmond the camera and everyone shuffled together to pose, Maurice didn’t hesitate. He didn’t awkwardly catch my eye and raise a brow to make sure he could stay. The kid didn’t speak up for the first time to ask if he should stay; he didn’t mouth “Me too?” to ensure he wasn’t overstepping.
Nope: Maurice just leaned in like he belonged. He crossed his arms authoritatively and exuded the same confidence that had drawn him to us in the first place. Looking once more at that photo, I hope I’m reading it correctly and he found comfort, just like we did. I hope he believed he was just one of the guys lunching in Gas Leak Corner.
Because he was.
Just look at the picture.
You’ve read enough already to reach this point, so I won’t say much, but I confess to feeling vague envy for everyone growing up nowadays with a powerful camera in their pocket. So many of my favorite high school moments are minuscule morsels of half-memories as I approach my twentieth post-graduation year. Even knowing the immense cost that accompanies smartphones and social media, there’s a part of me that wishes I could see what those moments looked like now. I didn’t feel comfortable often during high school, but I’d love to hold onto more tangible versions of those moments when I did. That I can’t, though, only elevates the power of photographs like this one.
Unsolicited advice: preserve your favorite snapshots. No matter where you go or where you’ve been, there’s value in the portals they offer whether you touch them up or not.
Thanks for reading.