Portraits in Sepia

So usually dinnertime discussion at home is pretty darn bland. Sometimes there’s peppered talk of my escapades at work, "in the city," but the house is usually a cacophony of unceasing movement and sound, both neurotic and psychotic, wracked with aunt’s nervous anxiety and my uncle’s schizophrenia, respectively. My dad sits at the table huffing and puffing about how late dinner is (7:00pm) or about some new, pre-packaged hysteria propagated by mass media, ie: repeating verbatim CNN commentary on Edwards as a strong choice for Kerry’s running mate. Uncle Ed paces back and forth across the kitchen, moved by his illness and its medication. He also jumps to his feet to clear a plate from the table and prepare it for and inserting it into the dishwasher the second a fork is laid down onto the table. Even if you’re only pausing to swallow or digest, you may not put your fork down, or you risk losing your plate quick as a flash right before your very eyes.

Everyone asks questions and rarely awaits the response before launching into another question to either the original subject or another. Questions fly around the room like mosquitoes at dusk, you’re bombarded with them, the same standard inquiries about your day, about the food, about what you’d like to have for dinner the next day, about plans for the weekend, about your significant other, and so forth. Because of the non-listening, the same question is asked and answered several times in one evening, in rotation, with a few extras on divergent topics tossed in for flavor. Aunt Lorie is up and down serving food, pouring wine, fetching things, checking pots, up and down enough to make you seasick, the entire meal. But it’s lively and it’s got its own charm and it's a free meal, sometimes experimental, but ususally pretty darn good.

Mommom asks at least 3 times a meal whether or not the dogs have been fed. She can’t imagine why, if they truly have been fed, as Lorie testifies, they would be swarming around her feet. It probably has nothing to do with the fact that she sneaks them covert pieces while she eats, thinking no one sees her through the clear glass tabletop. Probably nothing to do with the fact that they get leftovers and if there are no leftovers, hotdogs are cooked for them, not microwaved, mind you, but a pot of water is set to boil to make hotdogs for “the girls.”

It’s long been a pet peeve of my aunt’s when commercial establishments display photos of people who are not their family. The sepia portraits hanging in Charlie Brown’s or TGI Fridays really irk her. She detests the idea. We all brush it off as silly. Tonight the debate started up. For once, I decided to take her side because really, how many times in one night can you talk about the new birdfeeder or discuss Martha's sentence? My dad argued, “They’re dead! They don’t care!” Lorie passionately defended the deceased, “It’s disrespectful! They didn’t have a say in whether their picture was hanging up for everyone to see! Those people are making money off of people's dead relatives! How would you like it if you went into a restaurant and saw your dead mother on a wall, if she was dead I mean?”

I usually spend my energy getting riled up about more important things, like, oh, the fact that in this country damn near twenty women are raped every hour, or say, the fact that we're at war, still, orsomething simple, say, domestic violence, but hey, the conversation veered away from the banal for a moment so I rode the wave. Dad argued that you lose your rights to the image once you’re dead. I challenged with, “Then why do people write wills? You don’t lose your property rights once you’re dead. If you have a chunk of money, anyone who chooses can just claim a right to use it because you’re dead?” He didn’t know what to say so he asked, somewhat tongue in cheek, “Is this a civil rights interest then?”

I thought about it for a second, don’t we have a property interest to our own image? Of course we do....right? At least we have a privacy right to protect our image from being used by others, don't we? You always have to sign a waiver giving someone permission to use your image in a contest or promotion. Why should that end if you’re dead? Do you have to be famous? I know Jessica Simpson could sue if someone used her image in their restaurant to promote business. I know she could try anyway. What about those cease and desist orders for all the internet garbage? What do I know? I'm just a dumb law student.

So, since it's current, I introduced the idea, “What if I wanted to open a restaurant and put a big image of Ronald Reagan on my sign?” Well, he’s famous, you’d be using his fame to your benefit. but he's dead. It was unanimous that Reagan's image cannot be used. "Why not?" I wondered, “Why do some people's privacy rights have more currency than others, especially dead people's, when they are a celebrity?" Why is it okay for TGI Friday’s do hang pictures of Joe and Nancy Schmoe, but not Ronald Reagan? "How do you know that Nancy Schmoe was not famous in her day?” You get the drift of the conversation. I have to say though, by the end of the debate, I didn’t really know how I felt about it but I hate the "Oh he was more important than she was," rhetoric.

I know you can buy old portraits of folks long dead at antique shops or yard sales. Lorie thinks this should be illegal. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with that, but certainly don’t object to my mother’s noncommercial interest in such photos. Mom has several framed antique photos she enjoys, they live in her house as decoration, as pictures of humanity. Where does art become exploitation become art? Lorie draws that line at profit. She feels that an antique shop selling such images counts as corporate gain, even if it’s not used directly for the promotion of their business. She rode the fence about yard sales, because it’s probably people’s family making decisions to sell the image, but by the time she was at the end of her sentence, she was firm that no, such images should not be sold. It’s exploitation she argued, and not representative of a person's wishes. "But how do you know what the dead person wishes?" we argued. "Like Kelly said, the will tells us their wishes, if it's not in the will, we can't speculate," she said. That was a long path I didn't want to hike up, so we let her have that one.

Lorie topped her argument with a line that prompted me to step into cautious territory, I laid down my fork to fish around my purse for a pen and a piece of paper. On the back of a bank receipt, I wrote down the priceless quote that both won me over and completely drained her of credibility, "I would be so annoyed if I were dead and my picture was hanging on the wall at Sal’s Pizza.” I would be so annoyed if I were dead!

So, what do you think about the issue? I know my family is strange well outside the range of normal strangeness, but that aside, have you ever thought about those people in the faded portraits hung on the wall in chain restaurants? I remember when I was a kid, Wendy’s used to have laminate tabletops imbedded with images of old, prohibition era newspapers and photographs. I loved it. There was something about seeing the record of people of old. It was like an everyday museum of everyday people. I used to imagine myself on a Wendy’s table in 100 years. Big dreams for a suburban girl, eh?

Anyway, that’s the topic of the day. Sepia portraits and whether it’s okay to use photos of anonymous people. Are they still anonymous if you don’t know a single thing about them other than what they looked like at one particular moment in time? How does the fact that they’ve been dead for possibly 100 years effect our decision? Tell me, I want to know what you think.