We usually see only about five or six iconic photos of the 16th President. The first dugerrotype, the prebeard “long-faced” shot, the photo of him reading to his children, the “penny” and “five-dollar bill” photos, and the one taken just before his death, which showed him emaciated and worn-down. I’ve seen a few more photos than these, but to the average person, one or two of these images are all they’ve seen.
By the 1860s, one didn’t have to be locked in a stock with a frozen expression for fifteen minutes (or however long it was) to produce a photographic likeness.
So, is there a photo of a smiling Abe?
Or one doctored to show what he would have looked like smiling?
Actually, it wasn’t until almost the 20th Century that one didn’t have the hideously long exposure times to deal with, IIRC. (I think that’s one of the reasons why most of Matthew Brady’s photos are of dead people.) Certainly smiles in photographs are pretty rare before the XXth century.
I don’t think anyone smiled in photos back then. They all look like dour grey miserable people as they fearfully wait for the flash to finally go off. Or whatever it was they were doing.
It was a combination of style and the difficulty of keeping a smile during long exposure timee. If you smiled, the odds were you wouldn’t be able to keep it going the entire time, and any movement would blur things.
I don’t think anyone smiled in photos back then. They all look like dour grey miserable people as they fearfully wait for the flash to finally go off. Or whatever it was they were doing.
IIRC, that’s never been proven. I think that there was an attempt to run some tests to find out for sure, but that was blocked by either the family or the government.
The long exposure time was the main reason for this. Most people can’t smile for more than a couple of seconds before it starts to look like a fake Miss America smile. Plus, any movement would blur the photograph. Consequently, people usually adopted a plain, neutral expression that didn’t require any effort to mantain.
May I dispell the idea of the “hideously long exposure time”? From the Library of Congress:
With the introduction of collodion processes (a.k.a. “wet plate” photographs) in 1851, years before Lincoln became president, the exposure time was reduced to as little as two or three seconds. Collodion was used for ambrotypes (on glass) or tintypes (on iron). Most of Matthew Brady’s portraits of Lincoln were ambrotypes, not daguerreotypes.
