Why didn't people smile in old-timey photographs? A smile meant something different back then.
Our perceptions of smiling have changed dramatically since the 1800s.
Photos from the 1800s were so serious.
If you've ever perused photographs from the 19th and early 20th century, you've likely noticed how serious everyone looked. If there's a hint of a smile at all, it's oh-so-slight, but more often than not, our ancestors looked like they were sitting for a sepia-toned mug shot or being held for ransom or something. Why didn't people smile in photographs? Was life just so hard back then that nobody smiled? Were dour, sour expressions just the norm?
Most often, people's serious faces in old photographs are blamed on the long exposure time of early cameras, and that's true. Taking a photo was not an instant event like it is now; people had to sit still for many minutes in the 1800s to have their photo taken.
Ever try holding a smile for only one full minute? It's surprisingly difficult and very quickly becomes unnatural. A smile is a quick reaction, not a constant state of expression. Even people we think of as "smiley" aren't toting around full-toothed smiles for minutes on end. When you had to be still for several minutes to get your photo taken, there was just no way you were going to hold a smile for that long.
But there are other reasons besides long exposure times that people didn't smile in early photographs.
"Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci, painted in 1503Public domain
The non-smiling precedent had already been set by centuries of painted portraits
The long exposure times for early photos may have contributed to serious facial expressions, but so did the painted portraits that came before them. Look at all of the portraits of famous people throughout history prior to cameras. Sitting to be painted took hours, so smiling was out of the question. Other than the smallest of lip curls like the Mona Lisa, people didn't smile for painted portraits, so why would people suddenly think it normal to flash their pearly whites (which were not at all pearly white back then) for a photographed one? It simply wasn't how it was done.
A smirk? Sometimes. A full-on smile? Practically never.
Algerian immigrant to the United States. Photographed on Ellis Island by Augustus F. Sherman.via William Williams/Wikimedia Commons
Smiling usually indicated that you were a fool or a drunkard
Our perceptions of smiling have changed dramatically since the 1800s. In explaining why smiling was considered taboo in portraits and early photos, art historian Nicholas Jeeves wrote in Public Domain Review:
"Smiling also has a large number of discrete cultural and historical significances, few of them in line with our modern perceptions of it being a physical signal of warmth, enjoyment, or indeed of happiness. By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment […] Showing the teeth was for the upper classes a more-or-less formal breach of etiquette."
"Malle Babbe" by Frans Hals, sometime between 1640 and 1646Public domain
In other words, to the Western sensibility, smiling was seen as undignified. If a painter did put a smile on the subject of a portrait, it was a notable departure from the norm, a deliberate stylistic choice that conveyed something about the artist or the subject.
Even the artists who attempted it had less-than-ideal results. It turns out that smiling is such a lively, fleeting expression that the artistically static nature of painted portraits didn't lend itself well to showcasing it. Paintings that did have subjects smiling made them look weird or disturbing or drunk. Simply put, painting a genuine, natural smile didn't work well in portraits of old.
As a result, the perception that smiling was an indication of lewdness or impropriety stuck for quite a while, even after Kodak created snapshot cameras that didn't have the long exposure time problem. Even happy occasions had people nary a hint of joy in the photographs that documented them.
Another reason why people didn't smile in old photos is that dental hygiene wasn't the same as it is today, and people may have been self-conscious about their teeth. “People had lousy teeth, if they had teeth at all, which militated against opening your mouth in social settings,” Angus Trumble, the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia, and author of A Brief History of the Smile, said, according to Time.
Even wedding party photos didn't appear to be joyful occasions.Wikimedia Commons
Then along came movies, which may have changed the whole picture
So how did we end up coming around to grinning ear to ear for photos? Interestingly enough, it may have been the advent of motion pictures that pushed us towards smiling being the norm.
Photos could have captured people's natural smiles earlier—we had the technology for taking instant photos—but culturally, smiling wasn't widely favored for photos until the 1920s. One theory about that timing is that the explosion of movies enabled us to see emotions of all kinds playing out on screen, documenting the fleeting expressions that portraits had failed to capture. Culturally, it became normalized to capture, display and see all kind of emotions on people's faces. As we got more used to that, photo portraits began portraying people in a range of expression rather than trying to create a neutral image of a person's face.
Changing our own perceptions of old photo portraits to view them as neutral rather than grumpy or serious can help us remember that people back then were not a bunch of sourpusses, but people who experienced as wide a range of emotion as we do, including joy and mirth. Unfortunately, we just rarely get to see them in that state before the 1920s.
This article originally appeared last year.
Before you click 'send' on anything else, read this comic. It's important.
Everyone seems to be clicking "send" a bit too early nowadays.
We officially live in a world where internet trigger-happy world leaders can send massive populations into a devolved tail spin with erratic tweets, posts, and subsequent responses. These posts can have far-reaching consequences, and in the haste to respond in kind we've forgotten that we've normalized this kind of attitude.
Boulet is a French comic artist who has been writing about this for 15 years.
Originally he started writing an autobiographical series, but when he realized how accessible it was to his readers, he decided to make it fictional. "So it's mostly 'drawn stand up comedy,'" he explains. "I'm the main character, but in the same way comedians are there own character when they are on stage. The purpose is not really to talk about me but about situations of everyday's life everyone can relate to."
In his words, "The comic (below) was an anecdote about a Facebook mistake, I had basically two choices: Use it as a Facebook status to make my friends laugh or try to dramatize the whole process into an internal crisis to make it a story."
Comic by Bouletcorp, where it originally appeared. Used here with permission.
That "internal crisis" is something Boulet is very interested in.
Boulet enjoys using the accessible medium of cartoons as a way to explore complex issues. He loves learning about and studying consciousness and neuroscience. His fans enjoy this.
"There were fun discussions in the comments about how the brain works ... the very idea that we have a parallel process that can interfere, overlap or get in conflict is actually a thing. What I found most intriguing about this story was to literally feel my hand freeze BEFORE I could put an explanation on the WHY it froze."
He also had a great suggestion as to figuring out the motivations behind certain posts. "We should always go on social networks with EEGs on. We would learn a lot."
After what we've seen on social media over the last few years, it's hard to disagree.