All you can do is keep your head down, listen for better jobs out there, and take the Bible’s advice about kidney stones - “this too shall pass…”
This would be close to what I would tell one of my managers if they came to me with a proposal for regulating employee pictures.
"You’re there to supervise work not to look at what employees have posted in their cubicles. If you must worry, do it about something useful.
In today’s economy with everyone desperate for a job you don’t want to be looking, trust me. There are lots of things in life to get upset about, this isn’t one of them."
You’d be crazy to try to accomplish anything by sending the email. What do you think is going to happen? Is the same dimwitted boss who came up with the policy going to have an epiphany about how stupid it was and change it? No, he’s going to get pissed and grumpy. What does a pissed and grumpy boss do? He makes your life miserable.
Handle this like every other dimwitted plan–go along with it until people forget about it. Come Halloween everyone is going to have pics back on their desk of their kids going trick-or-treating.
The company owns or rents the space. They can make the rules about what is permitted there. If you don’t like it, you can work somewhere else. If they have a large enough talent drain and it’s because they are too totalitarian about their rules, they’ll figure it out and change the rules.
Know what I’d do? Make a montage of all your favourite pictures, reduce it in size until it’s a billionth of an inch across, mount it on a post-it note and put it up. To the casual (or not so casual) observer, a blank post-it with a dot in the middle. To you, a nice little ‘fuck you’ to the policy.
Maybe only I’d giggle at this every day.
Also - “It’s clear you don’t have enough to keep you busy, we will have to talk about that”.
Please don’t apologize, you’ve done a great deal to help me out here. I still don’t think it would have come back to me for reasons I won’t get into but you’ve pointed out a flaw in my online presence that I didn’t realize existed. So my future self thanks you!
I had to read this eight times. 
Now I’m committing it to memory. If I cared about such things - and wasn’t a lowly guest - I might make that last sentence my sig line. If I understood you correctly, then I feel similarly about a friend’s seemingly ill-advised wedding a few years back; they still seem happy together.
I started an IMHO thread to discuss what should be allowed in decorating your work space.
Speaking of ill-advised work behavior…
Oh yes they will. You don’t know how email systems work internally do you?
Bongmaster’s plan was always to send it from a throwaway account on a public computer. His employers, if motivated and vengeful, might still have traced it to him, but not quite that simply.
No, I didn’t play games like that. If somebody was doing something dumb (like making up unnecessary rules) I didn’t respond by doing something dumber (like making up unnecessary work). I would just explain why we weren’t going to use their idea and hope they’d learn from it.
That would make a much better response if the OP had given a reason to truly think the guy was OCD, rather than just your average anal retentive perfectionist know-it-all.
OCD is about fear–being afraid of obsessive thoughts, and thus trying to deal with them via compulsions. It is generally quite obvious when the person is in “irrational mode.” When not having a flare up, most of our thoughts are based entirely on reason. Yes, sometimes that reason is “I don’t do this because it distresses me,” but the level of distress is usually pretty high to reach that level.
And you better bet you can be reasoned out of those fears and behaviors.–that’s what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about.
People with OCD tend to be perfectly rational most of the time, and I resent being treated like some irrational subhuman*. I find that my rationality is greater than most people’s around me. (This board is a bit of an exception, but there are still plenty of irrational behaviors here not caused by mental illness.)
What really should have been said was the old saying: “If [the boss] wasn’t convinced of this rationally, he won’t be unconvinced rationally.” That holds both for those with OCD and those without.
*Not saying you were, just that the same reasoning is often used to discriminate against us.
Really? Nothing? A pile of shit? The picture of the baby with the cleft lip they use in the newspaper ads to raise money? The hole where the World Trade Towers used to sit? East St Louis?
If you must send an email, go over the CEO’s head - send it to the board of directors. You’ll be in shit anyway, but maybe he will too.
It seems to me that a relevant question would be “Looks worse to whom?” Another might be “Does it affect what we’re here for?” And since nobody seems to have said it: “Cite?”
whine (noun). A protracted, high pitched noise as emitted by a machine, such as a jet engine.
whine (verb) 1. To complain (of someth.) with a raised vocal pitch.
2. To complain, debate, ask questions about, oppose, or suggest alternatives to a rule enacted by someone in a higher position of authority, or who assumes such authority.
Sad to say, definition 2 seems to be the most applicable here. I’m still flabbergasted. I could see it in a manufacturing environment, assuming we mean the workers who actually operate the machines or put the pieces together. But in any office environment, no. At my last job, you could call facilities and have them come to your office and drive a picture hanging bolt into a wall stud.
Here is an idea to get past the ban…
Put your loved ones picture on your desktop wallpaper, or if the boss is a dick about that, have one on your phone.
Just a thought, maybe the boss is over-reacting, but maybe there was a genuine cause or complaint or something that set him off?
Maybe the boss got one comment too many from a customer about the office being messy? Maybe someone left food unseen on a messy desk and got an ant infestation?
Maybe a document got “lost” in somebody’s personal clutter?
Yes, on the face its a pretty stupid policy, but don’t we all have our little personal quirks?
But most of us don’t have the ability to force everyone around us to conform with our personal quirks. That’s abusive.