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Smiles - Photos

I Ratant said:
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Kodak Brownie cameras were introduced in 1900.
There were lots of them around.
Formally posed and smiles all around!
I'm the cute one...
For my Dad who was in England preparing for the invasion at Normandy..
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Well, according to rjh01, he must have been at least 16 years late. ;)
 
My guess? Marilyn Monroe. And probably some other star models smiling dazzlingly in famous photographs, and people wanting to look like that.

Photographs have for a long time been susceptible to memes; remember the victory signs? Seen those shots taken at an angle, with the lips pursed? The guys leaning their necks back, folding their arms coolly, and the girls puckering their lips?

Most of those are born and die quickly, but the smile is always fashionable - and for good reason, too.
 
Just found this History_of_the_cameraWP where it says
The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer.
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So people have been taking photos since 1888. Though not sure how many were sold.
 
rjh01 said:
Just found this History_of_the_cameraWP where it says

So people have been taking photos since 1888. Though not sure how many were sold.
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Way longer. That's 'film'. For at least a generation prior to film, there were other techniques. Mostly daguerreotypeWP, ambrotypeWP, tintypeWP, and calotypeWP.

I actually question the original premise. My impression from working with old photos over the years, is that probably smiles are quite common in genre photos, but rare in event photos or formal portraits, and the latter are much more likely to be archived.
 
zooterkin said:
Well, according to rjh01, he must have been at least 16 years late. ;)
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The New Jersey National Guard was activated and sent to England in 1942.
I recall seeing manuvers in South Carolina at Fort Jackson just before then.
If memory serves, Mom had to drive we kids from there back to New Jersey as Dad had already left, in the winter of '41-42.
 
I agree with the idea that it was the formality of having to go to a professional photographer that resulted in stuffy pictures but that, as cameras became household items, it became more natural to take more relaxed photographs.
 
I think it was a hangover from portrait painting. Only the well-to-do could get portraits done and they generally went to great pains to look all serious-minded, knowing that their portraits could hang for generations and/or centuries. No one wanted to look like a ne'er do well or gadabout, so they sat or stood for days in their most serious pose, trying for all the world to look like they had something serious that they should be doing rather than sitting in a studio.

I think the subjects of the first fifty years of photographs thought of same as their version of the oil painting in the great hall at the manor. They wanted to look serious and responsible, not flighty and irresponsible.

Alternate theory: The smile was only invented in the 1930s by Shirley Temple, but most people weren't nearly as cute as Shirley so they frowned and tried to look pensive rather than humiliate themselves for generations when people would say, "Why's he smiling in that picture? He sure don't look like Shirley Temple to me!"
 
rjh01 said:
The only explanation I have been given is that exposure times were long and it was hard to maintain a smile. This may have been true in the 19th century, but exposure times in the 20th century were at worst only a few seconds. It is easy to maintain a smile for a few seconds.

My explanation is that this has something to do with society. But that cannot be the whole story.

Why is this so? Any other ideas?
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Well, that's the story I heard many years ago.

I also heard photography killed the quasi-photorealistic painting, leading to all kinds of weird crap like Picasso and Van Gogh. Why try to do a "real" painting when a photo's got it covered flawlessly?
 
Andy Warhol copied other peoples work, like the wage slave that came up with the Campbell's soup label, and made millions.
 
I Ratant said:
Andy Warhol copied other peoples work, like the wage slave that came up with the Campbell's soup label, and made millions.
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We can debate the importance of Warhol to modern art, but first - what in the blazes does that have to do with the topic?
 
There's no way to assign effect to things like art, the perceptions of which are strictly personal.
What is the way to do art then is different than the way to do art now, with photography a subset of art.
"Piss Christ" is only a photograph, which needs an explanation as to what it is supposed to represent. Otherwise, it makes no sense, and even with the explanation, makes still no sense.
Grim visages were common way back when, but not today.
But smiles weren't exactly rare.
 
rjh01 said:
Thanks for the idea. The ideas so far are
1. Exposure time
2. Professional photos. Expensive. Be formal. Do not be frivolous by smiling.

But even then I do not think that is even close to being the whole truth.
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I have, I guess, seen very different pictures from that time - mostly myfamily (extended) smiled, pretty much all my wife's family (extended) smiled. Many photos I saw of others had them smiling. Cameras and processing were not expensive then - even granting it was the late '40s, 50s and early 60s (to get me through high school). The same applies to home movies seen (and on some sites you can examine a lot of those for yourself: my favorite - http://www.archive.org/details/home_movies :)
 
zooterkin said:
Off the top of my head, since you're talking about posed photos, I'd say it could have been a hang-over from when it was necessary to hold a pose for a few seconds due to longer exposure times. The idea of a posed (professional?) photo being serious may have been current, and if it cost a fair bit of money some people wouldn't have been laughing about it. What changed? When did cheap cameras and processing become widely available and used? I'd guess that once people were more used to having their picture taken in an informal setting, the idea of smiling in a posed photo became more acceptable.

Do you have more details of the sorts of photos you've been looking at?
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Earlier than you might think - definitely middle class affordable in the 1880s - and what made Kodak a powerhouse in photography. http://www.myantiquemall.com/AQstories/kodak/Kodak.html
 
JihadJane said:
Dunno, but my dad took so long adjusting the light meter, shutter speed, aperture etc that we usually wanted to kill him by the the time he took the actual photo.
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Sorry, but AMATEUR wanting to look pro - seen the syndrome often. If you know how to use your lightmeter and how you wanted the picture to turn out 40 seconds or less should do it - and, unless the light kept changing, after that you could pretty much snap away.*

None of the above applies to photography for LIFE, National Geographic, or equivalents - usually.
 
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