Couch Communiqué

Do you ever wonder why no one smiled in old photographs? There are several reasons why people looked unhappy and weren’t thrilled to have their picture taken.

In photography’s earliest days, exposure times were very long. The subject had to remain still for as long as 20 minutes. By the early 1840’s, exposure times had decreased to about 20 seconds. It was still hard to hold a open smile for that amount of time. Any movement would result in a blurry photo.

Photographing children was especially hard. Squirming children were sometimes put in restraints to minimize movement during the exposure.

Another reason was social etiquette. In a 2013 article called “The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture,” art history scholar Nicholas Jeeves writes that portrait subjects eschewed smiles because of social stigma. Artists portrayed smiling people as imps, drunkards, children, or fools, and no one wanted to bear those labels. This carried over into portrait photography.

This began to change with the advent of amateur snapshot photography. According to Angus Trumble, the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia, the norms of spontaneous, amateur photography began to bleed into more formal photography as people developed new expectations about how they wanted to be seen. By World War II, the shift in photographic norms was pretty much complete.

“People in human history have smiled, laughed, and behaved more or less as they do today, in other words naturally and spontaneously, in the private sphere,” says Trumble. “What is radically different is public performance and public presentation.”