Quote:
“BTW, it used to be a custom in some areas to photograph the dead all laid out in their boxes or whatever. They were supposed to help remember the dead and all.”
The dead were great subjects because they held really, really still for the long exposures. In fact, some of the most riveting photos of the era were Matthew Brady’s work shooting the battlefields of the Cival War after the battle was over (with the dead soldiers laying around).
licence photos tend to be a little like that…I guess it’s because you generally aren’t smiling when you have to hand it over to the copper when you’ve been pinged for speeding…or in your sisters case ** Tamex** to your CO when you get sprung trying to sneak back onto base at 0500!
Well, I’ve never had to have a license photo retaken for smiling. In fact, I’m smiling on my current license. I’m not grinning or anything like that, though. It’s more of a “Mona Lisa” sort of smile. It’s certainly not the dour expression my sister had to maintain to get her military ID photo to pass muster.
All I can guess about the military ID thing is that the US military wants to portray itself as mean and ready to fight–not a bunch of grinning, smiling pansy weaklings.
I’ll suggest that it is both the cultural AND chemical reasons. Why does it have to be one or the other?
I’m a professional cameraman, I shoot EVERY DAY. Take a snapshot, and people smile. Take SIXTY seconds to compose the moment, and let your subject know they are going to be shot…and you will most likely get a more pensive image. I think it’s human nature.
As for the chemistry, the simple facts stated above need no elaboration, they are absolutely correct. Why not accept a blend of both theories?
Cartooniverse
I would agree that it comes down to a combination of cultural and chemical reasons. lissener is surely correct to argue that the conventions for early portrait photographs were simply an extension of the conventions for portrait painting. Remember that a painted portrait would have taken even longer to paint than a photographed one would have taken to photograph.
Press reports of a recent study about smiling in paintings suggested that smiles with the teeth showing were almost entirely unknown in Western art before the late eighteenth century. The suggestion was that improved dental care began to make smiling acceptable. The other factor which was mentioned and which seems equally relevant to the OP is that grins with the teeth showing had been the traditional way in which artists had depicted madness.