Everyone on these pictures looks like they’re pissed off.
I’m talking from the mid 1800’s to at least the 1930’s. Nobody is ever smiling in formal photographs. The men all have a stern look on their face, the women a scowl. Children have a blank “I’m getting a beating after they snap this” look on their face. Was there a cultural prohibition on smiling during that period of history?
The only time I see smiling in old photos is when it’s pictures of workers. Factory workers, coal miners, etc… They’re covered in filth yet quite a few are smiling. WTF?
Formal portraiture required taking a position and holding it, sometimes for several minutes at a time. People did it rarely, often for special occasions, and “looked serious” – solemn might be a better word – when they did. For many years we had a blown up, colorized picture (painting over photograph) of the little girl who would have been my aunt if she had lived, who died about 1920 at age seven. She was attempting to be solemn and serious for the picture, but you could see the little-girl impishness in her eyes.
Photographs replaced portrait painting, and for early photographs and portrait paintings both you didn’t want to smile because you were going to be sitting there for a loooooooong time. You wanted a nice relaxed expression so that your muscles wouldn’t get tired. Eventually photographic film got fast enough that you didn’t need to sit there for a long time, but by then the standard was in place. You smile because you were brought up that people should smile in photographs. They didn’t smile because they were brought up that people didn’t smile in photographs.
Photos way back when were often formal things, for which social norms considered smiling to be inappropriate. Faster and cheaper photography made it much more affordable and therefore practical to start photographing informal events where smiling was much more acceptable.
Another factor is where the pictures are from. My wife is a Ukrainian national. In the majority of posed photographs she’s shown me, the people aren’t smiling. Candid snapshots are different. According to her, Ukrainians smile when they are happy or amused, not just to look nice.
First, in that time period, it was mainly professional photographers who had cameras to begin with. Affordable cameras for the ordinary man weren’t all around as they are now, so people treated getting all dressed up and going to the photographer’s studio as a formal event, like going to church on Sunday. Getting your picture taken would have been an infrequent event in most people’s lives and was treated as serious business, since the picture was intended for posterity.
Secondly, before the introduction of film cameras, the photography medium was a chemically treated piece of glass and long exposure times were needed. People had to stand stock still for a period of a few minutes, and any unnecessary movement would cause blurring of the picture. It would have simply been too hard to hold a smile for that long, and any attempt to smile would look forced and unnatural. People started smiling in photographs when faster film and shutters were developed and it wasn’t necessary to stay still for more than a fraction of a second.
Some friends of mine just had old time “wet plate” photographic portraits made for their upcoming album. They had to sit motionless for six seconds on a bright, sunny day. Stare into a mirror and try to hold the exact same smile for six seconds.
On a show about antiques on BBC America, this is basically how the antiques expert explained it. It was the fashion at the time to have a serious expression when having your photo taken. It was seen as more dignified, and made the men look handsome and the women look serene.
This is a photographmade of Grant’s officers in the Civil War, an attempt at candid photography. Notice the “ghosts”- it was caused by people not holding perfectly still while the plate was exposed. Not to sit perfectly still for a family portrait would have similar results (though maybe not as pronounced).
Also of course, a lot of people had terrible teeth and didn’t want to show them, and closed mouth smiles can look very unnatural.
Trivia: Sometimes the clothing they’re wearing in those photographs isn’t real but was a costume the photographer had that was similar to the clothes sometimes used on corpses. The person slipped it on over whatever they were wearing. Sometimes it was because their own clothes were shoddy, more often it was if the photographer didn’t think it would photograph well (for example, something with a lot of stripes or a bold pattern).
Some combination of this and the overall formality of having one’s portrait taken are a better explanation for the latter part of the time frame given by the OP. Exposure time issues were much less of a concern after about 1880. That’s when Charles Bennett discovered how to make gelatin plates much more sensitive. He was actually attempting to make them less fragile and prone to scratching via a baking process. He found that his process also dramatically increased the sensitivity of the emulsion. At that point, exposure times allowed for what we could call a “snapshot”, and Eastman invented roll film about 10 years later. If you think about it, snapshot film speeds were required for the invention of the movie camera, circa 1890s.
Actually, back in those days, there wasn’t much to smile about, since the entire world was in black & white, with subtle shades of gray (or in some areas, kind of a brownish tint). It wasn’t until the 1930’s that the world became “colorized” and people started smiling.
This change actually took place at the same time that the popular movie “The Wizard of Oz” was being produced, and you can see that some of the movie was shot before the change and some after.
I know this is correct, because I read it in Calvin & Hobbes.
I figured everyone new that one!