Shooting babies

I was a Wal-Mart photo peddler.

By Chris Neal

Jan 3, 2000 | It's a Monday afternoon in summer and I'm standing in the Wal-Mart in Tazewell, Tenn., trying to convince Tiffany to smile. Tiffany's family is gathered around her as she lies on a table moaning and threatening tears.

My job: Take her picture, whether she likes it or not. Tiffany, a dear little 4-year-old with tremendous stamina, is dead set against it. She is afraid of me, afraid of the table she's refusing to sit up on, afraid of the big black camera bristling with duct tape and squeaky toys -- and she's freaking out. Her family is just as determined to have the photo as Tiffany is not to sit for it, and I, as always, am caught in the middle.

Twenty minutes of clowning, cajoling and begging pass, during which the line of impatient customers behind my collapsible desk has snaked into the boys' wear section. I have to call it off; I am defeated. There will be no 8x10s, no 5x7s, no 3x5s, no wallet-sized snaps of a beatific Tiffany, resplendent in her youth. There will be no picture of Tiffany at all.

Next.

Painful as it was, the Tiffany episode was a fact of my life -- repeated daily and most often involving a Kaitlin or Kaitlyn or Caitlin or Kaytlin or Kate Lynn -- for about half of this past year when I worked as a traveling portrait photographer in Wal-Marts across Tennessee.

It was my job to hit every store in the territory that didn't have a built-in portrait studio and stay for five days. I would shoot the masses with my handy traveling studio -- a seven-foot-high exoskeleton bearing several scenic backdrops; a table with color-coordinated rugs thrown across it; and a shopping cart bursting with toys and stuffed animals, all of which could be collapsed and crammed into the trunk of a car -- and move on.

I had been roped into this peculiar brand of torture by a newspaper ad. I had wanted a writing job, but after six months of unemployment I was prepared to take anything I could get. The ad promised travel and photography, both of which are hobbies of mine anyway. After six months of interviewing for a variety of jobs, the encounter for this one featured just one question: "Do you have a good car?"

I had the right answer, and immediately became an employee of PCA International, owner of every photo studio in every Wal-Mart in the nation.

Over the next three weeks of training, I learned that the traveling portrait photographer must be, by turns, a workhorse, an artist, an accountant, a salesperson, a sheep dog (getting more than two children at once to sit still and look at one fixed point is a tremendous challenge) and the head of the complaints department.

I learned that traveling portrait photography is barely a photography job at all. The camera is designed so that almost anyone can use it, not even allowing for a change of focus. Instead, it's about baby wrangling and retail and I assumed, erroneously, that I could handle it all.

So every Thursday morning between May and October, I stuffed the studio into my '93 Saturn and drove to another far-flung corner of east Tennessee, where I would spend an hour and a half setting up the studio, crammed between the aisles of the women's or children's departments.

At 10 a.m. I would open for business, luring beleaguered mothers and other bearers of children into a kind of bait-and-switch photo scheme that required them to pay just $6 to $10 for a package of prints -- of one shot -- that they could pick up at the store in about three weeks.

Following the photo session, I was expected to coerce the customer into buying the company's $19.95 discount card. If I didn't sell as many cards as other photographers, I could expect to hear about it. Three weeks later, when the customers came back for their package, a salesperson would press them into buying a selection of the other shots I had taken during the session.

During those months, I experienced fleeting moments of warmth and creativity and even triumph -- surrounded on all sides by hours of misery, frustration and defeat. And stress, lots of parent-induced stress. The emotional weight placed on these discount pictures is immense; and so failure, for the parent, carries the stench of betrayal. When a child is too frightened, angry, suspicious or indifferent to smile for a total stranger, it means Grandma and Uncle Herb won't get pictures to hang on their walls, and the parent will not be passing out wallet-size photos at work.

Next Page: The photography part demanded the bozo treatment

• View blog reactions