Something about the photo posted below made me recently think long and hard about that famous quote by Nietzsche. It is a picture I took for the paper to promote an auction that is being held by a local pregnancy center. When I took it, it suddenly left me wondering if it was real. Nothing in the picture seems real. It seems like some ridiculous ad, almost like a parody of an ad. With its racial inclusiveness and unbelievable fake emotion, the whole image seems not only contrived, but unreal. It surpasses the usual, “just fake enough to be real,” philosophy taken by the creators of print ads and tv commercials. But after all, I took the image, so it had to be someone real. The whole experience made me feel unreal as well.
In the end, I’m not sure I can even find the right term that I’m looking for. I used a thesaurus to look up the term “unreal,” and I was left short. I couldn’t find a word that fit the feeling I had about this picture. “Fake,” “phony,” “made-up,” “imaginary,” “fanciful,” all of these don’t quite what I’m looking for.
More on this later. Until then, the photo.


























