A reader asks why I never use before and after photos

A reader wrote to me this week with a question I get more often than any other, and this time I thought I would answer it properly, in public, because the answer says most of what I believe about the whole business.

She asked, quite reasonably, why I never use before and after photographs. Everyone else does, she said. If you are glad for what people manage, why not show it.

It is a fair question, and here is the honest answer. I do not use them because I do not think they measure the thing they claim to measure, and because of what they quietly teach.

Start with what a photograph can and cannot hold. A before and after picture records how a body looked on two mornings, under whatever light was chosen, at whatever angle was chosen, after whatever was or was not eaten the night before. That is all it records. It cannot show whether someone sleeps better, or climbs the stairs without thinking about it, or feels steadier in themselves, or has kept going for two years rather than two weeks. Those are the things I actually care about, and not one of them shows up on camera. So the photo is not evidence of progress. It is evidence of appearance, and it invites you to mistake the second for the first.

Then there is what the pair of pictures teaches, whether or not anyone means it to. It teaches that the point of all this was to be looked at, and that the before was a state of shame to be escaped from. I do not accept either idea. The person in the before photograph was not a problem. They were a person on a particular morning, and they deserved better than to be turned into the thing everyone is relieved you no longer are.

I understand why the pictures are everywhere. They are simple, they are quick, and they make a promise the eye can grasp in a second. Words are slower. But the things worth having here are slow too, and I would rather be honest about the pace than hand you a picture that skips it.

So here is what I keep instead of photographs. I keep track of small, dull, real things. Whether the walk still happens on the grey days as well as the bright ones. Whether the smallest step up feels a little easier than it did last month. Whether a person is still turning up, which is, over any length of time, the only measurement that has ever told me anything worth knowing.

None of that would make a good picture. It does not need to. The reader who wrote to me is doing better than she thinks, and I could tell that not from any photograph but from the fact that she is still asking questions six months in, still curious, still here. That is the after I care about, and it does not fit in a frame.

If you have ever felt quietly judged by a wall of transformations, let me offer you the opposite. You do not owe anyone a before. And the after was never supposed to be a photograph of you. It was supposed to be a life that is a little easier to live, measured on the ordinary days, by you, for you, and by no one standing behind a camera.