Boy Photoshops girl: A Flickr love story

Helen A.S. Popkin

Rosie Hardy and Aaron Nace are together for Valentine’s Day, which no doubt thrills their Flickr fans who’ve been following the couple’s 9 ½-month relationship via the photo-sharing Web site almost since the beginning.

It’s the photos of the couple together that have enchanted a growing number of soft-hearted saps across the Internet because Rosie, 18, and Aaron, 24, are almost never in the same room when the photos are taken. They’re not even in the same country. Rosie lives in Buxton, England, and Aaron in Chapel Hill, N.C. The photographers met on Flickr, and thanks to image-manipulating software, they’ve created a growing collection of wistful, fairytale illusions in which they are together.

At least, if that’s what you want to believe. As the cheer section that makes up the majority of comments on the couple’s photo blog demonstrates, plenty of people do. As the nastier comments on Rosie and Aaron fan blog entries reveal, there are those jaded, cynical haters who don’t buy much of what we see online, this relationship least of all. The collision of fates that make their love story is too preposterous. The couple is too ridiculously attractive. The highly stylized photographs are far too polished and professional. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

A couple of things are certain: Rosie and Aaron are (physically) together on Feb. 11, and they’re certainly, neither of them, dogs. Technotica confirmed this via a video Skype call to (um … allegedly?) Rosie’s home in Buxton, where she lives with her parents and Aaron is visiting until Feb. 22.

“Internet hug!” says Rosie as she stretches her arms and leans toward the Web cam to show me how she greets Aaron on Skype when the two are an ocean apart. And St. Valentine help me, it’s more than this jaded, cynical hater can do than to resist her adorable smile and British accent, and Internet-hug her back.

Rosie Hardy / Aaron Nace / Flickr "I will always be here for you," a "Compilation Sunday" project in which American Aaron Nace adds himself to a self-portrait Rosie Hardy sends him from England.

Our Skype interview starts a bit later than planned because the couple say they'd just finished up a long photo shoot and needed time to clean up. Fantasy and theatrical make-up are a recurring theme in Aaron and Rosie's collaborative and solo work, and for this particular session, Rosie’s face was painted blue, “like a Smurf,” she says.  The couple huddles together in front of the computer camera in the poorly lit guest room.

Watching them via Skype, it seems this couple has the talent, yet none of the cool-kid affectation. The two blurt their plans to be together in July, when Rosie finishes college and moves to North Carolina. Once together, they’ll continue to expand their business enterprise, ARF (Aaron and Rosie Fotography) which already does a respectable trade retouching images, selling original photos and doing client shoots.

Though engagement isn’t yet an announcement, Rosie thrusts her “promise ring” from Aaron into the camera, a gold-and-diamond number with a second stone the color of “blurple,” her favorite imaginary shade. Then it’s down to brass tacks: A review of the legend of their unlikely meeting.

“We count our anniversary as the day we met,” Rosie says, the effusive half of the pair. “That was April 29.” Aaron nods along with a half-smile behind his hipster beard, filling in story gaps when prodded by his peppier half. April 29 is the day they first saw each other on Flickr.

Rosie, a photo-sharing newbie, was 12 days into her "365 Days,” a community Flickr project in which participants take and upload one self-portrait a day. That’s when a friend showed Rosie photos from another participant’s set (Aaron’s) that were remarkably like her own — playful images in which both seemed to be dining on a foot or twisting their faces in similar goofy expressions.

Rosie set out for home, with every intention of contacting this other photographer who’d been on Flickr for several years, only to find that by the time she logged on to her account, Aaron had e-mailed her first. “It was pretty weird,” says Aaron, agreeing on the kismet. “We both get a lot of people who contact us (via Flickr) so for that to happen is really unlikely.”

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