The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture

http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/09/18/the-serious-and-the-smirk-the-smile-in-portraiture/

by larrys • 13 years ago

99 24 13 years ago

By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.

Not sure this explains it all. Maybe later not smiling got established as the style of portraiture of high class because the high class was the only to have portraits in the first place, but doesn't explain why they didn't smiled in the early days.

The best explanation I heard about this was technical: old photos had long exposure, and holding a perfect smile for long is tiring.

ginko• 13 years ago

Take a look the portrait paintings here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_painting

Barely any smiles either. And paintings don't have the long exposure time of photographs. Sure, you would have to pose for an extended amount of time, but a talented painter could apply any facial expression he chooses from a quick sketch.

abecedarius• 13 years ago

K-mart models smile, Prada models look haughty. Enough centuries have passed to doubt it's arbitrary convention. I think it's that smiling's associated with appeasement; in your role as high-class you're above appeasing the viewer.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

With an ISO of about 1, it’s not uncommon for exposure times to fall in the 5-10 second range, even in broad day light. Smiling is not recommended for these long exposure times.

-- Fernando Ramirez, Making tintypes

http://nondo.net/blog/?p=486

jeremyjh• 13 years ago

Yes that was my guess upon reading the headline. I was surprised they did not even mention this.

azernik• 13 years ago

It's mentioned, just not in the context of early photography:

  When a camera is produced and we are asked to smile, we
  perform gamely. But should the process take too long, it
  takes only a fraction of a moment for our smiles to turn
  into uncomfortable grimaces. What was voluntary a moment
  ago immediately becomes intolerable. A smile is like a
  blush – it is a response, not an expression per se, and
  so it can neither be easily maintained nor easily
  recorded.

qwerty_asdf• 13 years ago

I had always assumed that it was due to the long exposure times of early photographic techniques such as the Daguerreotype.

Specifically, since photographic skill was in short supply, and people with equipment had bad experiences with blurry faces when people couldn't maintain their smiles long enough for the exposure, that a trend emerged advising people not to smile.

Then, as this trend became firmly entrenched and everyone forgot the original reason, an idea was collectively conjured that it simply wasn't "fashionable" to smile in a photograph.

Gravityloss• 13 years ago

The question could be asked in another way: why do Americans smile so much in photographs, compared to many other cultures? Right now.

This research seems quite insular.

chc• 13 years ago

I've met a lot of people from a lot of different cultures, and all of them tend to smile in photographs. Can you list a few where smiling in photos is odd?

beat2• 13 years ago

In modern (as opposed to old) photography, smiling is often forced and awkward. As a serious photographer, I don't like posed photos at all, except from people who are comfortable and expressive while modeling. For most people, I prefer candids. And in my candid work (which isn't necessarily representative of the world at large), people tend to either look serious, or be laughing. Smiling is less common.

stan_rogers• 13 years ago

Thinking of your portrait subjects, even in the most formal portrait setting, as "modelling" is starting at the wrong end. Personally, I'd like to see the word model eradicated from the ordinary photographer's vocabulary; we have had the perfectly good subject and sitter to work with for longer than we've had photography. A model is just that — a stand-in for a "real" person (or persona). It's a job that people can be good or bad at, and when we think of our "real people" subjects as models, we immediately expect too much of them.

The root portray in the word portrait, on the other hand, is one we should pay more attention to. As photographic portraitists, we don't have the luxury of creating an expression that represents the essence of the subject from a (relatively) long period of observation; we need to elicit and capture a person's natural expression (sometimes one that fits a target portrayal) under conditions that are anything but natural. That's people skills, not camera or lighting skills, and those skills can be learned. (If you want a quick but not-so-cheap lesson in basic technique, it might be worth checking out Peter Hurley's video The Art Behind the Headshot. As a photographic technician, he's merely competent, but he's good at waking people up and making them themselves.)

beat2• 13 years ago

I agree that model work (and I don't have a problem with the colloquial meaning of "model") is fundamentally different from formal portrait. But that said, I do actual models and studio photography quite a bit.

Even when using models, I'm generally after some essential expression of personality. The difference between a good model and an ordinary sitter is that they can achieve direct expression directly and comfortably, and through indirect means (such as playing a role or wearing a costume).

MrJagil• 13 years ago

This is close to blogspam. I think the source article is better: http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/09/18/the-serious-and-the...

potatolicious• 13 years ago

Petapixel is all blogspam, they appropriate a lot from their sources, including rehosting photographs they don't have the rights to. The amount of content they take from their sources seems to go well beyond the typical "quote and link" blog format.

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

I don't like smiling at all in photos. It seems so fake, and unnatural. If they do insist on me smiling, I smile as big as I can to the extent it looks more scary than happy. "What? You wanted me to smile?!"

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

Does anyone else clearly see a cheeky smile on lincoln's face in 3/4 of those photos?

notacoward• 13 years ago

Yes.

brudgers• 13 years ago

Looking at the uncropped image (from the source link) of the "smirking Lincoln", the smirk disappears [for me] and he simply looks relaxed.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_Lincoln_O-116...

In fact, after returning and looking at the cropped image, he no longer looks like he is smirking at all. Maybe it's the power of suggestion in the article.

bane• 13 years ago

My in-laws are definitely not American (they're East Asian) and grew up as young children at the tail end of a rather serious war which killed several million.

My Father-in-law is quite genial and smiles quite often in person, never in a photo. My mother-in-law usually doesn't smile in photos either (despite being an incredibly warm person who smiles and laughs quite a bit), but she smiles enough that there's a photographic record of her smiling exists.

But, I've never taken a photo of my father-in-law or even seen one where he is smiling. In family portraits everybody has a nice warm smile, except for him. He looks like he's attending a funeral.

It's funny because the photos of my mother-in-law, the ones where she's smiling, seem to capture her personality much better than the ones where she is not. And you'd never guess at the personality of my father-in-law from a photo at all.

About 2/3s of people of my wife's generation generally smiles. And pretty much 100% of the next generation smiles.

jpalioto• 13 years ago

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever."

Adding this for posterity: I have such a huge stupid smile on my face to help maintain my privacy.

bcoates• 13 years ago

In what universe is having a big grin associated with being a humorist? The people in the top half of photos look more bored than serious, but Lincoln and Twain with their set jaws, intense stare, slightly tilted/twisted head and expressive, engaged faces look like they're about to say something either deadly serious or seriously funny.

Those bottom half ones would all be great modern photos, I wish I could capture people like that. Most of the subjects I photograph wind up looking either confused or goofy.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

I've heard some Americans that work with Russians comment that they actually feel this way about smiling during the day at work. It's a sign that you are an idiot or not taking things seriously or something.

seiji• 13 years ago

Serious doesn't require being bleak, solemn does: http://www.ted.com/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious.html

PeterisP• 13 years ago

Hah, there's even an old Russian folk saying 'ulibka bez prichini - priznak durachini' which literally means 'smile without a reason indicates foolishness'. :)

The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture

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