My son comes up with a phone and shows me his photos: his face as a teenager, his grandfather, what he would have if he were a girl. The app is called FaceApp. It offers different options by touching the screen. Portraits as artificial as robots. They don't exist in reality. Ghost faces. I've been frightened and he laughed.

What would you tell your child to express my discomfort to you? Can he never become a grandfather? We don't know beforehand when we're going to die? Because I've been thinking about death the pictures he's shown me. One thing is the spectral character that has the image of something or someone that disappeared a long time ago. It is not in vain that it has been immortalized, immortalized. And another, totally different, with images of the future, that promised the future and denied the possibility of death. Or not? Why can't I laugh at the game? It's a game. And this is one of the possibilities offered by the app: a broad smile on the face that expressed something else. I think it's the most appropriate filter for me, as I have few photos to smile. Are we saved those rare, suspicious species of that kind?

The need to smile in portraits is relatively recent. It was not done before. That's why Mona Lisa's figure is so special, and she also laughs at him. Faces don't smile in the paintings of Rembrandt and Velázquez. It should be taken into account that there were no dentists and that teeth would not be the most visible parts of the face. In the portraits of photographers of the 20th century, there are also few cheerful mouths, seldom found in the motives of August Sander or Dianne Arbus. But we are from the 21st century, all right. We've invented selfies and smileys. Thus, a British artist recently entered the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with a FaceApp smartphone installed and has transformed his models into paintings and sculptures. They were too serious, they said. His great idea has had a lot of followers and imitators. Is that what the app is for, so that we are more joyful than we are? Just with your finger?

We know that the distortion of reality – and counterfeiting – is at the very heart of photography. Photos have always been a mystery, an illusion. Those who have thought about photography have written about the aggression, the perversion and the perversion they have made to the one that has been portrayed. The effects are also from beginning to end, when photography was a document of consolidation of reality. The first techniques required long exposure and the movements during that time produced a phantom effect. Sometimes involuntarily, sometimes intentionally.

I've heard that this FaceApp app is an app to get bored fast. Her fun to offer is short. Because the results are always very similar. And for the moment, we don't want to believe that we all have the same image one day. Variations of a few clones. The metamorphosis caused by the filters is so superficial that it is so far from touching anything inside, it is so insignificant! Maybe that's what scared me the most when I saw the collection of photos that my son taught me: the baratity of the trick itself. I was reassured. It's not that I'm too serious, it's that I prefer games that give for a long time.