Photoshop Ruins Everything!

I posted this.  It was an Internet sensation.  Everyone I’d ever met “liked” it.  Within minutes, 78 people had shared it.

And then I saw this.  This photo of Pope Benedict (in papal white) and Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (in black) was taken at the Vatican on January 13, 2007. 

I pulled my first photo off the web, before it further cluttered the cloud with its particular brand of clerical nonreality.

When it’s possible to remove ex-girlfriends from photos, photobomb your friends with dancing cows, show yourself smiling and waving in front of palaces you’ve never seen, doesn’t that kinda spoil things for those of us who really do take pictures the old-fashioned way?

Oh—by the way, here is a postcard from Rome, in the years before Photoshop caught on with the masses.  It was taken in September 2000 in one of those quaint little photo booths, like you see at the state fair and maybe the mall.  This booth, though, was in the subway in Rome; and for about one Euro (or a few lira back in those days), you could have your personal photo reproduced as a postcard (like this one, of my husband and me) or imprinted on a rubber stamp.