Smiling faces assist with sad discoveries

We have been told from the time we were infants to say "Cheese" and almost instinctively slap a happy face on our countenances wherever our pictures are being taken. FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss. -I was sitting on my front porch listening to the radio when I heard the saddest Hurricane Katrina sight I've seen. Maybe that's because I'm a word person. A vivid word, sometimes, is worth a thousand pictures.

Or maybe it's because television and newspaper photographs of the devastation are limited to a single screen or a small block of newsprint real estate. Even with a wide-angle lens or an aerial view, you're seeing only one puzzle piece, a minute and jagged part of a massive picture.

On the last day of 2005, I took a tour of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, snapping photographs almost randomly as we drove through the war zone. When I got the pictures developed, they were amazingly inept at showing what I'd just seen. Even putting them together on a table didn't do the sight justice.

But something I heard on the radio did.

The sad imagery was this: Louisiana's medical examiner -or head coroner -has written a book. He was talking about it, and thus about identifying bodies, the gruesome task made worse and often impossible by bloating caused by the flood waters and decomposition hastened by the high temperatures of a long, hot September.

Families searching for loved ones -there are still close to 2,000 people unaccounted for along the Gulf Coast -often bring to his office photographs of missing kin. If the person is smiling in that photograph, sometimes that smile can be matched with teeth to identify the dead.

It gives an entirely new meaning to the term "sad smile."

The irony in his matter-of-fact statement about identifying the dead by their smiles hit me like a ton of bricks. I looked around the house that night at framed photographs of my family, mostly pictures of my nieces and nephews. In almost every shot, the person is smiling.

Discount-store photographers coax babies to smile with funny hats or squeeze toys. One old portrait photographer's trick is to give a baby a piece of Scotch tape, sure to keep him occupied and eventually illicit a smile. I have a boatload of smiling baby pictures.

And then there are those pubescent shots when the self-conscious subject tries not to smile, hiding braces or, worse yet, teeth that desperately need braces.

And yet, somehow, when facing a camera, most of us, even awkward preteens, manage a smile. We have been told from the time we were infants to say "Cheese!" and almost instinctively slap a happy face on our own countenances whenever our pictures are being taken.

I guess we want to be captured in a happy mode, not a sad or thoughtful one, most of the time. Only authors on book jackets try for the contemplative look that requires no visible teeth. And usually, police mug shots are of unsmiling faces; nobody half-sane arrives at the slammer grinning.

From that coroner's brief comment, I could imagine the files of photographs of thousands of smiling people, citizens in happier times, unaware that one day a wall of water would breach a dam, flood a street, climb to the rooftop of their homes and hold them hostage there.

Portraits are taken on happy occasions -at high-school graduations, weddings, birthday parties, family reunions. Nobody normal would dwell on or anticipate the macabre use a coroner might have for them after a deadly hurricane obliterates a region.

Since troglodytes scratched pictures on the walls of their caves, humans have preserved their own faces in paintings and photographs. The poorest man, the homeliest woman, has a picture of himself or herself taken at a carnival or a shopping mall, a frivolous or momentous occasion frozen forever in a smile.

(c) 2006 Rheta Grimsley Johnson