Parents are still buying weirdly formal and awkwardly-posed school photos. Why?

An excellent question. For me, I think was this (while he was still at school):

The third reason is my own feeble sentimentality. If there is a picture that exists out there of my precious offspring, how can I say ‘no, thank you I don’t want it’?

I did love how Ahuroa School did their own photographs, and they were always vastly better than the “professional” ones. In nature, moderately natural, not in uniform, fairly relaxed. I’m not sure if they still do that or not – part of it would have been that a parent was an excellent photographer, but surely that will continue to happen, to some degree of “excellent”.

I don’t understand why schools don’t do this themselves more. Some staff member or student must be a decent photographer with reasonable equipment, and then either sell them for peanuts pocketing the money for the school, or just give them to the poor parents who have forked out for enough school stuff already.