OLD PORTRAITS HOW TO

A photograph of two officers in the Mexican-American war in 1847 shows one smiling, and an image of poker players from 1853 also has one smiling man and one focused on his cards. Some early photographs of smiles show the importance of context in determining the expression on the subject’s face. The images they created were formal and befitted the expense of paying to have a portrait made, especially when that portrait might be the only image of someone.īut even from the beginning, a less experienced photographer might break the norms that were being established, suggests Gustavson.

OLD PORTRAITS HOW TO

Accordingly, high-end studio photographers would create an elegant setting and direct the subject how to behave, producing the staid expressions which are so familiar in 19th century photographs. Though saints might be depicted with faint smiles, wider smiles were “associated with madness, lewdness, loudness, drunkenness, all sorts of states of being that were not particularly decorous,” says Trumble. But, she says, while smiling in general may be innate, smiling in front of a camera is not an instinctive response.Įxperts say that the deeper reason for the lack of smiles early on is that photography took guidance from pre-existing customs in painting-an art form in which many found grins uncouth and inappropriate for portraiture. That idea, she says, comes from our world, in which it seems “natural to smile for a picture” and people have to be told not to. That means the technology needed to capture fleeting expressions like a genuine smile was available long before such a look became common.Ĭhristina Kotchemidova, a professor studying culture and communication who wrote an article on the history of smiles in snapshot photography, also questions the technology argument. By the 1850s and ’60s it was possible in the right conditions to take photographs with only a few seconds of exposure time, and in the decades that followed shorter exposures became even more widely available. “If you look at the early processes where you did have a long exposure time, you’re going to pick a pose that’s comfortable.” But he says that technology has been overplayed as the limiting factor. “Some of that is true,” says Todd Gustavson, technology curator at the George Eastman Museum.

Another common explanation for the lack of smiles in 19th century photographs is that, because it took so long to capture a photograph back then, people in pictures couldn’t hold a smile for long enough.

Old portraits