Photo Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty
In the summer of 2023, Josh, 40, a speech therapist, married his girlfriend Tejal in a lakeside ceremony in Massachusetts. In a photo from the celebration, the couple smile broadly—the bride in a bright red lehenga, the groom in a cream kurta—with Tejal’s beaming parents beside them and Josh’s mother in the background. She stands next to an empty seat that was supposed to be occupied by Josh’s father, a cheerful truck driver who died in 2007 at age 63 after a quick battle with Parkinson’s disease. “There are two couples, one person, and this perfect space in between,” Josh thought. Why not Photoshop it in?
So Josh uploaded the wedding photo to r/PhotoshopRequest, along with an old picture of his father and reference photos of the emerald kurtas and turbans worn by the groom’s guests. The subreddit, with over a million members, is a digital space where the Adobe hopeless ask experts (known in the group as “Wizards”) to edit memories for them. Some members offer the Wizards between $5 and $50 for the work, though many Wizards take on free edits and occasionally list their PayPal accounts as “tip jars” for jobs well done. People come to the subreddit with all sorts of requests: to finally delete your ex-boyfriend from the vacation selfie, remove the bridesmaid you had a fight with from your wedding party, or slowly turn your brother into a French bulldog like the ’90s Animorphs book covers depict. (Josh joined the group after a post popped up on his feed from a member who wanted to turn his yawning cat into Godzilla.) But some of the subreddit’s most popular uses include helping people process loss, from fixing grainy images of dead pets and imperfect funeral photos to memory-altering pleas like Josh’s.
Some members want to Photoshop their memories to bring closure. Others prefer to simply look at what could have been. Looking at his final photo, which was Photoshopped by a magician in Canada who put her own spin on the turban, Josh feels a mixture of happiness and pain. “It’s there, it should have been there, but you still know it wasn’t there,” he says. He plans to hang a print on the wall and give his mother another one for her birthday. “It’s still a little therapeutic just to see that.”
One of the most popular conjurers on the subreddit is Akash Harsana, a 23-year-old biotech graduate from Delhi and self-taught photographer who started editing seven months ago. He quickly gained popularity 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 ten years ago and wanted to see what she would look like today, or the teenager who lost his father last year and didn’t have enough photos of the two of them together. Harsana says the most difficult aspect of the work is staying true to the true essence of a deceased person. Many conjurers use AI to get a quick result, he says, but he prefers to do things the old-fashioned way. AI adds unnecessary noise to the image: hyperreal blue eyes where the person had brown ones, a distorted nose and cheek structure. Each request takes three or four hours, and he spends 16 hours a day on Photoshop. Half of the requests are paid—Harsana says he makes around $1,500 a month from edits on this subreddit alone—the other half are mourning images he creates for free to give back to the community.
Of course, even the most decent corners of the internet stink of the internet, and there are plenty of requests Harsana isn’t willing to take on. There are men who want to make revenge porn out of old pictures of their ex-girlfriends, scammers who want to manipulate the hand gestures on strangers’ profile photos for fake social media verification, and a whole host of insurance scammers who ask him to Photoshop their cars with smashed windshields. While members tend to respect grief, the subreddit’s moderator told me that posts requesting cosmetic changes are vulnerable to trolling. “Go to the gym, you fat motherfucker,” someone wrote under a girl’s picture and wanted an edit of the “first photo of her in a long time that she didn’t hate,” he tells me. (Mods remove comments like this.)
Some members expect hate from strangers online and are genuinely surprised that it doesn’t come, like 33-year-old Yuri, who lives in Moscow and needed a picture of his son, who died at nine months of hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the brain. The family needed a picture for the grave, but the baby had spent most of his life in hospitals and was always pictured with cannulas. Yuri chose a photo in which his son appeared to be smiling: “We only had this one photo where he looked happy,” Yuri told me. “I don’t know if he was at that moment, but at least he looked that way.” Since Reddit didn’t accept payments with Russian cards, another Reddit user 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 grieve with strangers on the internet than with well-meaning friends who don’t quite know what to say. Mira, a 34-year-old publishing professional from Boston who wanted to grieve under a pseudonym, had been a subscriber to the subreddit for many years for the “fun stuff” and occasionally saw the condolences, but she never thought she’d do one herself until her husband committed suicide last fall and she needed a photo for his memorial service. Her husband was a creative designer, and Mira felt it was odd to ask strangers on the internet for Photoshop help instead of him. She uploaded a photo of him from her cousin’s wedding and asked to take the Solo mug and beer can out of his hands. It was difficult to find a picture of him alone. “You think you have so many pictures of a person, just him, but you look at them and it’s like, Whoa, I’m in these, someone else is in these,” says Mira. During a time when she felt uncomfortable opening up to her inner circle, her Reddit inbox exploded with condolences. Strangers told her how handsome her husband had been. They shared stories of losing their own husbands.
Mira’s husband is not smiling in the photo she uploaded. She tells me she was tempted to have the magicians change his expression. “It’s so obvious 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, took the cup and the can away and left the moment as it was.
