Great Big Smile

Meet the eclectic employees of SmilePosts, the nation’s number one purveyor of school portraits. These uncelebrated heroes invade schools in the cities and suburbs, setting up their cameras in dusty auditoriums and sweat-stained gyms for the rite of passage known as picture day. They futilely persuade kindergarteners to sit still. They hold their breath in the reek of pubescent sixth-graders who need to discover deodorant. They are a motley group of mostly twenty-somethings, struggling with financial independence and unfulfilled dreams. They engage in uncertain workplace romances and form friendships that help them through the long days filled with thousands of student pictures. Sometimes the little kids pee on their equipment. It’s a hazard of the job. The yearly portraits they take endure on family staircase walls, nostalgic social media posts, and tragic nightly news broadcasts, but the photographers themselves are long forgotten. Great Big Smile is the story of these photographers.