Throwback Thursday: Why don’t people smile in many old photographs?
We can't know for sure, but here are a few possible reasons.
The many photographs taken of Queen Victoria throughout her life where she almost always looked sombre could have played a role. It is said she never smiled because she was in constant mourning for her beloved husband, Prince Albert.
In most old photos – those taken in the 19th century and early 20th century – people aren’t smiling.
Very early technology made it harder to capture smiles. Long exposure times – the time a camera needs to take a picture – made it important for the subject of a picture to stay as still as possible so that the picture wouldn’t look blurry. It’s harder to maintain a smile than a serious or neutral expression.
But smiles were still uncommon in the early part of the 20th century when technology had advanced to shorter exposure times. That suggests there were also cultural reasons people didn’t smile in old pictures. Victorian and Edwardian culture looked down on smiling. Smiling “was a habit of the lower classes”, so if you wanted to look good, frowning would be the way to go.
Photography was probably not something available to all social classes and you had to be someone to have your picture taken. Photographers would take very few photographs and in many cases a single one that had to be right.
The words of Mark Twain – Â a man who made a living as a humourist – sheds light on the subject:Â “I think a photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”
Early photography was heavily influenced by painting, which meant no smiling. Hence the hoo-haa about the Mona Lisa ‘smile’.
Long before ‘say cheese’ became one of the most hackneyed phrases on the planet, nineteenth century photographic studios would have people say ‘prunes’.
Today photography is a means of recording our lives as they’re lived. But in the early days of the art, it was indebted to a tradition of portraiture in painting. A photograph was a frozen eternal presentation of a person, not a moment in time. It represented an ideal of life, not a slice of it and that meant no smiling.
