Meta, Are You High?

“The robots are everywhere,” I whisper to my husband one night in bed, “do you think they’re procreating?” He laughs at the joke, but I am not smiling. Just last week Meta showed me a picture of my daughter.

“Reimagine your photos with a creative backdrop,” it said.

reimagine
your
photos

How do I opt out of this? How do I kindly explain to Meta that I do not wish to reimagine my photos? That I take photographs to remember my actual life, not distort the memory of it? How do I kindly explain to Meta that the original photo taken in the back of my 75-year-old house with a camera built 26 years ago was—and is—perfect?

Not perfect in the technical sense, but perfect in the sense that it is real.

That is my real daughter sitting on a real stoop in front of a real sliding glass door. That is our real backyard, where she plays and runs and shrieks and jumps on the trampoline and occasionally takes breaks to sit and look at books. That sunlight is real. Her little shadow is real. That big tree you see in the reflection? Real, real, real.

When I look at this photo, I immediately know the context. I know it is winter, because the tree branches are bare. I know it’s late afternoon, because golden hour happens in our backyard. I know we are home, and we are together, our favorite place to be.

How do I kindly ask: Meta, are you high?

Why would I ever want to reimagine this?

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Photo taken February 2, 2021—pandemic still raging—on the first roll of film I ever shot. Nikon f100, fuji 400, scanned by The Find Lab.