Heads of the Class

Cyclones, earthquakes, starvation. A few important things are happening in the world today. But I have to admit the story in the Sunday paper that had me scratching my head was the one about the altered yearbook photos.

Lifetouch, a Twin Cities-based yearbook company, has admitted that one of its employees altered photos submitted for use in the McKinney (Texas) High School yearbook. The PiPress ran the Associate Press story about the controversy, while the Star Tribune had a reworked version of the AP story by Janet Moore.

According to AP, the school's yearbook staff had sent in instructions requiring that Lifetouch "make heads the same size and eyes at the the same level" in the individual portraits. It sounds like the "work" went well beyond this, however -- more than a "touch" of Photoshop resulted in many students' heads being grafted onto multiple copies of the same body, some necks being stretched, an arm being erased, and one girl's head being set atop a nude torso (albeit with the breasts blurred ... thanks to the phantom retoucher for that nicety).

The McKinney yearbook has historically been "award-winning," according to the press reports.

One can't help but speculate about how this "mistake" (as the Lifetouch flak calls it) happened. We're talking about some serious time spent on these 580 retouched photos. It clearly wasn't an accident.

What do we know about McKinney High School? It's located in an affluent suburb of north of Dallas.

A quick peek at the parent and student reviews on the Great Schools website reveals a couple by parents that criticize the administration or allege that the students run the school, and a few semi-intelligible, student- or parent-written reviews about how great the school is:

Mckinney [sic] high school is a wonderful school with wonderful faculty and things of that sort.
Submitted by a former student. Posted October 30, 2005

High to extremely performance in academics. Very enthusistic [sic] and highly experienced leadership and faculty teachers.
Submitted by a parent. Posted August 25, 2005

McKinney High School is a great school for academics and sports, its [sic] a very organized school in which a lot of parents would love for their students to go to.
Submitted by a student. Posted October 19, 2004

Hmmm. I have a theory. The phantom retoucher at Lifetouch has been working on the McKinney yearbook for years. S/he knows that the book wins awards, but also knows that the source materials arrive at Lifetouch in bad shape or with annoying instructions, and the book gets turned into something "award-winning" only because of what Lifetouch brings to it.

This year, something snapped, and the phantom retoucher decided to get creative with it. It's not an excuse, by any means, but it might be a reason.

My final thought is that even if the culprit doesn't get fired (and it's hard to believe that won't happen after the PR thrashing Lifetouch is taking), it sounds like the phantom retoucher is suffering from a major case of yearbook burnout, so perhaps a new job is in order.