Wizard Photographs

[snazzzybird]

No: HPFGUIDX 42351

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Snuffles MacGoo <msmacgoo at o...> wrote:
> I've been wondering this for some time - about the Wizard pictures -
 what 
> happens when someone dies? Does their image stop moving? What is it 
that moves? 
> - Gilroy Lockart's photographic image appeared to share his vanity, 
What else 
> might they share? 
<snip>
> storm

I have wondered about this too.  At first I assumed that the camera 
captured a person's appearance and certain personality traits (ie 
Lockhart's vanity), and that these would remain as they were at the 
time the photo was taken.  A person who died in real life would 
still "move" in photographs.  By the same token, the photo would not 
age as the person aged: any photo taken of Harry as a baby, for 
example, would always be a photo of a baby -- not Harry at whatever 
is current age might be.

However, canon gives us an incident which confuses this issue.  I'm 
sorry I can't remember which book it's in -- but Percy has a 
photograph of Penelope Clearwater, and she's ducking out of the photo 
because she has a pimple.  Did she have this pimple when the photo 
was taken?  Unlikely, because she wouldn't have given such a photo to 
Percy.  (Or if he was the photographer, she would have begged him not 
to take a picture of her until the pimple cleared up, and he surely 
would have complied.)  So how did the "Penelope" in the photo get the 
pimple?  If she got it because the real-life Penelope got one, then 
why doesn't the wedding photo of Sirius Black show a thin man with 
long, scraggly hair?

--Snazzzybird, who doesn't even want to think about what this would 
lmean for photos of dead people... and who is sorry to add another 
level of complication to an already complicated question.