entertainment

23 Photographers Share the Most Cringeworthy School Portraits They’ve Taken

17.

I asked a 4th grader if she hurt her foot. “Uh, I have a prosthetic leg”. She was wearing sandals and sure enough rubber foot.

18.

We were expected to do 3 sets of pictures for each student, one for the yearbook, one for cap and gown and one set of casuals. Casuals usually involved hand poses with a table we’d bring and some cutesy stuff, like holding a rose up to your shoulder, or full body pictures. A girl comes in, she looks OUT of it. Like really not connected to the world. I take the yearbook pics, I take the cap and gown. All the while her smiles are so obviously faked and her eyes are just gone. I tell her to change into her regular clothes to take her casuals and she’s like “okay” all monotone. She comes back and has huge bandages on her arms. Clearly this poor girl had tried to kill herself rather recently and was just taking these pictures out of obligation or something. Instead of taking them and having them show up in the proofs that would go out to the parents, I tell her, “okay you’re good, thanks for coming!” And she just shrugs and leaves, just as apathetic as before.

19.

I once had a kid who thought it would be funny to have a Chewy granola bar sticking out of his shirt pocket. I told him it would be funnier if he removed the wrapper first. There is now a picture of a kid with an unwrapped granola bar in his shirt pocket in a yearbook somewhere.

20.

On a Middle School registration day shoot some kid comes up wearing a naruto headband. I asked him to take it off and he told me he wore it for religious purposes. I knew perfectly well he was bullsh*tting me but I didn’t feel like making it a big deal, I just told him he’d probably regret it in a couple years and snapped the pic anyway.

Written by Irvi Torremoro

Irvi Torremoro is an Austinite by way of Las Vegas. She's worked in various outlets in food & beverage and is now focused on writing, eating all the things, talking about Beyonce, and petting all the puppies. She runs flavorandbounty.com, a lifestyle blog about people in the service industry.