The risks of relying on one photo to capture all of a person

At its most accomplished, photographic portraiture approaches the eloquence of oil painting in portraying human character, but when we allow snapshots or mediocre photographic portraits to represent us, we find they not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity. Catch a person in an awkward moment, in a pose or expression that none of his friends would recognize, and this one mendacious photograph may well outlive all corrective testimony; people will study it for clues to the subject's character long after the death of the last person who could have told them how untrue it is. 

When only one photograph survives, its authority is unimpeachable, and we are in the position of jurors who have to decide a case based on one witness's unchallenged testimony. Within my own attic archives, I can think of a picture that, if it were the only surviving photograph of me, might provoke some descendant to write: "She was a pinched, humorless woman, evidently incapable of enjoying any worldly pleasures. It is tempting to think that the beauty celebrated in the photographs she took was a means of externalizing the rapture and wonder she obviously could not feel within herself.

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015), p. 308

Lessons in snobbishness last

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English "education" fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school—I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet—but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 169 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)