By Liza Mundy

Sunday, May 26, 2002; Page W08

The other day I was walking by a colleague's desk. The top was like anybody else's, covered with pads and pens and Post-its and whatnot. To one side, however, was a small wall that consisted exclusively of photographs of her son. They weren't framed or anything. They were just pushpinned to the corkboard: photos of her son in diapers, her son in his highchair, her son at the beach, her son as a baby, her son as a toddler, her son with her husband, her son by himself. There must have been 20 or 30, a lovely, haphazard collage -- a video reel, almost -- that she could see, out of the corner of her eye, the entire time she was working.

It was unusually extensive, but otherwise much like other photo assortments in my workplace. Throughout my office -- and, I'll bet, yours -- there are any number of these surreptitious family shrines, picture after picture of loved ones, plus, often, crayon drawings. Small things, maybe, but a change from office life of yore, when the family photo came with a whole different agenda, a different emotional freight. Time was, the family portrait was partly a career prop, public proof that the busy executive had it all. Now, I think, it's more of a pictorial admission, by many of us workers, that we don't.

Time was -- 20 or 30 years ago -- when Mom and kids would go to a studio and sit, and the idealized result would be framed and given to Dad, who would take it to the office and display it for visitors to admire. Often, I'm sure, said photo really did enable the working man to contemplate his loved ones between appointments, but it served other purposes as well. In a workplace where one came into constant contact with women not one's wife, usually women subordinate to oneself, it was a helpful reminder that one was unavailable for dalliance; or, if one did dally, evidence that there were children involved and the other dallier shouldn't expect too much. To the world in general the photo was an emblem, an asset, a hanging prize. Behold, it said; I am not only a lawyer or corporate titan, I am a husband and father. It clarified that work and family occupied two distinct realms, and testified that the owner had achieved success in both.

Now, the opposite is true. On one level, to be sure, random unframed photos are just an expression of the more casual (and cramped) nature of the modern so-called office. For many of us, to hang a framed formal portrait of our family would not only look out of place; its weight alone would topple our cubicle wall, knocking over the next cubicle and triggering a disastrous domino effect. More than that, though, today's photos are an expression of the conflicted feelings of the modern office worker. Rather than relegating the family to a different realm, they are an attempt to bring the two realms closer, to admit family into the office. They are attempts to make us feel that we are not separate from our kids; that we are still with them, and they with us, vivid, changeable, in the flesh. They are expressions of pride, yes, and love, yes, but also of guilt and longing. So powerful are the emotions roused that a friend of mine, upon returning to work after having her first child, found that she couldn't bring any photos; they made the absence from her son too painful.

Not everything has changed. Formal photos still hang in uneasy coexistence with informal ones, in women's offices and in men's. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent time at a company she refers to, in her book The Time Bind, as "Amerco." There, she noted, it was the lower-ranking women who peppered their desks with intimate family snapshots. For these women, she posits, the photos sent a message: I may not be powerful here, but there's a place, home, where I am. The more high-up the woman, the less she indulged in these snapshots, as if they might call her commitment into question. Instead, executive women resorted to the traditional framed trophy photo. I don't entirely buy this distinction -- in my workplace, women at all levels do the montage thing, as do men -- but I do remember being in the office of a busy lawyer and seeing a framed photo of her and her kids on the beach, and it was facing me, not her, and I wondered, a little, if it was saying: I don't work as much as it seems!

Because photos, inevitably, are lies. Or at least spin. When displayed, they are an attempt to project to the world -- or ourselves -- a certain image. I have a friend who suspects that the more photos a man displays of his wife, the likelier it is that he's cheating. Similarly, at the same time that family photos testify to what we have, they also testify to what we don't. What we don't have, while we're working, is the very thing they display: the spontaneous moments, the golden unlimned hours. In keeping these snapshots at our desk we are like pets, really, that in their master's absence seek out his sweater to lie upon. Absent our family, the best we can do is bask in its representation, create the illusion that we can sense our kids, feel them, hear their laughter. Now, the office photo is an emblem not so much of achievement as of compromise, lurking worries, remembered joys, the crises we coped with this morning and the pleasures that await us at the end of the day.

Liza Mundy's e-mail address is mundyl@washpost.com.