When does a photo stop being a photo?

A few days ago I was at the stadium and I took a picture with my son. When I saw her I thought: who is that old gentleman with my boyfriend? And I trashed it. I did another, and then another, and then another until I resigned myself: that old gentleman was me. Sometimes we don’t perceive the years passing by and we feel younger than we are.

But since I don’t have a problem with vanity or age, I’ve chosen to try and answer a more general question: Do photos age us? I have found this to be the case. Meanwhile, a useful premise must be made: sometimes we don’t recognize ourselves in photos because, if we don’t take many photos, the only image we have of ourselves is the one we see reflected in the mirror in the morning and in the evening; but in the mirror it’s not us but our reflection, our right and left sides are reversed, so when we see ourselves in a photo we find it hard to recognize each other.

Beyond that, some research has shown that there are a number of technical reasons why smartphone selfies age us — up to 7 years older, according to some. This comforting truth came back to me about the latest tool Google unveiled: it’s called Magic Editor and it will allow us to edit our photos with a touch of our fingers. In fact nothing that you can’t do with programs like Photoshop, but the difference is that it will be free and easy. In short, it will be easy to look younger, not like those androids that come out by applying the filter on TikTok, but really. And it will be easy to change the sky of a photo, perhaps lifting the clouds or moving with respect to the sunset, knowing that generative AI will create the missing image. Or eliminate from a group portrait that person you now hate each other just like the Soviet oligarchs did in Stalin’s time.

In short, it will be possible to create photos of scenes that never happened. But when does a photo stop being a photo? And how much younger can I get before I’m ridiculous?