self
By Bindu Bansinath, a writer for the Cut who covers news, culture, and relationships. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Electric Literature. She was previously an assistant editor at Harper's.
Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty
In the summer of 2023, 40-year-old speech pathologist Josh married his girlfriend, Tejal, in a lakeside ceremony in Massachusetts. The couple smiles wide in a photo from the celebration — the bride in a bright-red lehenga, the groom in a cream-colored kurta — with Tejal’s beaming parents beside them and Josh’s mother in the back. She stands next to a blank space that should be occupied by Josh’s father, a cheerful truck driver who died in 2007, at the age of 63, after a rapid battle with Parkinson’s. “There’s two couples, one person, and that perfect space in between,” Josh thought. Why not Photoshop him in?
So Josh uploaded the wedding photo, along with an old picture of his dad and reference photos of the emerald-green kurta and turban the groom’s party wore, to r/PhotoshopRequest. With more than a million members, the sub-Reddit is a digital space where the Adobe-hopeless ask experts (known in the group as “wizards”) to edit memories for them. Some members offer to pay wizards anywhere from $5 to $50 for the work, though many wizards take on free edits, occasionally linking their PayPals as “tip jars” for jobs well done. People come to the sub-Reddit with all manner of requests: You can finally delete your ex-boyfriend from that vacation selfie, remove the bridesmaid you fell out with from your wedding party, or slowly turn your brother into a French bulldog à la the ’90s Animorphs book covers. (Josh arrived at the group after a post from a member who wanted his yawning cat transformed into Godzilla popped up on his feed.) But one of the sub-Reddit’s most popular uses is to help people process loss, from fixing grainy images of dead pets and imperfect photos from funerals to memory-altering requests like Josh’s.
Some members want to photoshop their memories to bring themselves closer to closure. Others just prefer the joy of looking at what might have been. Looking at his final photograph, Photoshopped by a wizard in Canada who added her own flair to the turban, Josh feels a mix of happiness and pain. “He’s there, that’s where he should have been, but you still know he wasn’t,” he says. He plans to hang a print on his wall and give another to his mother for her birthday. “It’s still a little therapeutic just to see.”
One of the popular wizards on the sub-Reddit is Akash Harsana, a 23-year-old biotech graduate in Delhi and a self-taught photographer who started doing edits seven months ago. He quickly gained traction, in the form of upvotes and awards, for his seamlessly realistic edits — like the work he did for a woman who lost her mother in a car accident a decade ago and wanted to see what she’d look like today, or the teenager who lost his dad last year and didn’t have enough photos of the two of them together. Harsana says the most challenging aspect of the work is staying true to a late person’s real essence. Many wizards use AI to turn around a quick result, he says, but he prefers to do things old-school. AI adds unnecessary noise to the image: hyperreal blue eyes where the person had brown, a warped nose, and cheek structure. Each request takes him three or four hours, and he spends 16 hours a day Photoshopping. Half of the requests are paid — Harsana says he makes roughly $1,500 a month doing edits on this sub-Reddit alone — but half are grief-related images he does for free, to give back to the community.
Of course, even wholesome corners of the internet reek of the internet, and there are plenty of requests Harsana won’t take on. There are men who want to make revenge p*rn out of old images of their exes, scammers who want the hand gestures of strangers’ profile photos tweaked for fake social-media verification, and a whole host of insurance fraudsters who ask him to Photoshop their cars with the windshields bashed in. While members tend to respect grief, the sub-Reddit’s moderator told me posts asking for cosmetic edits are prone to trolling. “Go to the gym, you fat f*ck,” someone wrote under an image of a girl who wanted an edit of “the first photo of herself in a long time that she didn’t hate,” he tells me. (Mods remove comments like these.)
Some members anticipate hate from internet strangers and find themselves genuinely surprised by the lack of it, like 33-year-old Yuri, who lives in Moscow and needed a picture of his son, who died at 9 months old of hydrocephalus, an accumulation of fluid in the brain. The family needed a picture to put on the grave, but the baby had spent most of his life in hospitals and was always pictured with cannulae. Yuri picked a photo where his son appeared to crack a smile: “We had just this one photo in which he seemed happy,” Yuri told me. “I don’t know if he was at that moment, but at least he seemed like it.” Because Reddit didn’t accept payment from Russian cards, a fellow redditor tipped on Yuri’s behalf. “I was shocked,” he says. “Not a single message was hateful, everyone was united by my grief.”
And sometimes it’s easier to mourn with internet strangers than well-intentioned friends who don’t really know what to say. Mira, a 34-year-old publishing professional in Boston who asked to use a pseudonym, had been subscribed to the sub-Reddit for many years for its “funny stuff” and occasionally saw the grief requests, but she never imagined she’d be making one of her own until her husband died by suicide last fall, and she needed a photo for his memorial service. Her husband was a creative designer, and Mira felt strange asking internet strangers for Photoshop help instead of him. She uploaded a photo of him from her cousin’s wedding and asked for the Solo cup and beer can to be removed from his hands. It was difficult to find an image of him alone. “You think you have so many pictures of a person, of just them, but you look through and it’s like, Whoa, I’m in these, someone else is in these,” Mira says. During a time she was uncomfortable opening up to her inner circle, her Reddit inbox blew up with condolences. Strangers told her how handsome her husband had been. They shared stories of losing their own.
Mira’s husband isn’t smiling in the photograph she uploaded. She tells me she was tempted to have the wizards change his expression. “It’s so apparent that he looks sad in the photo,” she says. “I wondered if I could ask them to make him look happier.” In the end she decided against it, removed the cup and can, and left the moment as it was.
Tags:
- self
- family
- mourning
- grief
- the internet
- loss
- More
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