Why People Never Smiled In Old Photographs

When you look at photographs from more than 100 years ago, you’ll likely find grim expressions and scowling faces staring back at you. It’s enough to make you think that people must have been really miserable in Victorian times... But why was everyone seemingly in such a bad mood? Experts believe they’ve found at least some of the answers to this question — and a few of them are more sinister than you think. But not all old photographs are deadly serious, and the rare lighthearted ones are incredible.

Why so serious?

Those rare smiles didn't start to appear in old photographs with any frequency until at least the 1920s. And considering that the very first photographs started to be taken in the 1820s, that's a very long time to keep such dour expressions. You'll spot a few smiles in the earliest photographs, of course, but as this new medium began to be adopted by families in the early 19th century, the standard expression was distinctly solemn.

Smiling is not a natural instinct

It could be that the subjects of these pictures just didn't know how to behave in front of a camera. Christina Kotchemidova, an assistant professor at Spring Hill College, explained in a paper called "Why We Say 'Cheese': Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography" that the concept of it's “natural to smile for a picture” is a modern one. She argued that smiling for a camera is not a natural instinct.

The sad Victorian is a cliché

It’s also not true that people in Victorian times were always sad or troubled. The lack of smiles in photos could support this cliché, of course, and Victorian people were living at a time that was indeed full of sorrow. The mortality rate was certainly a lot higher than it is today, and the standard of medicine was way beyond what we now take for granted. But the evidence against this notion of the sad Victorian is overwhelming.

There were good times to be had

You only have to think of the most popular figures from this era to realize that the Victorians had a sense of humor. Sure, Charles Dickens wrote some pretty harrowing tales — but there was a wicked streak of comedy running through many of them. And nobody would accuse Lewis Carroll of not having a wild imagination or a twisted idea of fun.

Gloominess was not the rule of the day

You must remember, too, that the Victorians were the ones who invented Christmas as we know it today. Anyone who can create a festivity so devoted to celebrating happiness cannot be eternally mired in doom and gloom! So we have to look much further beneath the surface to discover why Victorians never seemed to smile in their photographs.

Normal people weren't taking pictures

The first thing to consider might sound obvious, but it's true: photography was a professional medium to begin with. You needed someone with expert knowledge to operate the camera and then someone else with all the technical wizardry to chemically process the film to create the image. It's not something that could be done at home — and therefore probably seemed like a very serious business.

Everything was new — and dangerous

In those early days of photography — particularly between the 1840s and 1860s — a photographer placed a sheet of copper coated with silver into the camera and exposed it to iodine vapor. Then, after the photo had been taken, the photographer used mercury vapor and salt to create the physical image. This was a highly toxic process using potentially dangerous chemicals — so perhaps people were right to look a little concerned.

Out of the lab and into the home

Photography equipment was incredibly cumbersome, too. So it really wasn't until cameras started to move away from studios and into people's homes that subjects started to look more relaxed. “Take the camera out of the professional and put it into the hands of the snapshot photographer and then they can do whatever they want,” Gustavson explained to Time. And some early handheld cameras were surprisingly small.

Scientific vibes

George Eastman created the 1888 Kodak camera, for instance, and this took all of that dangerous chemical processing out of the public's hands and into the camera itself. The camera also included a manual on how to take a good picture and that started to guide the “cultural norms as to what photography was going to be,” Gustavson said. But all this took time — and it only partly explained why people were reluctant to smile in early pictures.

There were technological limitations

These days, of course, we can shoot multiple photos a second and capture even fast-moving objects in motion. But at the advent of photography, cameras struggled to capture images that shifted even slightly. This was because they had very long “exposure times” — the amount of time it takes to capture an image. That naturally meant that subjects had to sit a lot longer for their photos. But this does not fully explain the dour faces, either.

No movement was good movement

Any movement among the subjects resulted in blurry photos. “Some of that is true,” Todd Gustavson, technology curator at the George Eastman Museum, told Time. “If you look at the early processes where you did have a long exposure time, [the subject is] going to pick a pose that’s comfortable.” But he argued that the part technology played in keeping smiles out of people's mouths has been overstated.

Considerable advancements could have resulted in smiles

Gustavson said that the technology had gotten much more advanced as early as the 1850s. He argued that, in perfect conditions, some photographers in the 1860s could capture an image in just a few seconds. And as the 19th century progressed, cameras with shorter exposure times were available to a wider section of society. So, if this was the case, it would have been relatively easy to capture someone's smile in a photo. It's just that, well, people were still refusing to look happy.

But there were still some limiting factors

The cameras of the 19th century still had some technological limitations, though. “The box cameras tended to have fixed focus lenses,” Gustavson told Vox in 2015. “You’d have to be outside on a sunny day and pick the smallest lens, and it would still be a little fuzzy... focus down to three feet would limit it.” But more factors contributed to the phenomenon of "no smiling" than just imperfect technology. 

A popular medium almost at once

After all, photography became incredibly popular incredibly fast. Part of the reason for this was that even though getting a picture taken was a time-consuming and costly business, it consumed less time and cost less money than posing for a portrait. And back in the early 1800s, if you wanted to commemorate your wedding and create an image of your lover before he went to war, a portrait was your only option. In fact, portraiture influenced photography in all kinds of ways — including smiling.

Painting influenced photography

Remember, oil paintings are not exactly bursting at the seams with smiling people. It's actually hard to imagine Rembrandt’s portraits becoming quite so famous if his subjects were grinning from ear to ear. These portraits were meant to be important — capturing a person's image for the rest of time. This meant there was no place for a smile. It’s the reason Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa portrait is so debated. 

Portraits v photography

The Mona Lisa was painted smiling — kind of — and this was highly unusual for the time. It was this departure from the norm that made it so famous. And the truth is that, at first, people didn’t see much distinction between the importance of a portrait and the importance of a photo. The Photographic Journal of America interviewed a man in 1894 who acted as a model for Jesus in religious depictions, and he was of the same mind. 

Photography treated like paintings

The model — one Elmer Ellsworth Masterman — clearly didn't think the two mediums were so dissimilar. He asked, “What is the difference between posing for a photograph and posing for a painting?” And it seems this idea was ingrained into society at the time, too. If you couldn’t smile for art, then you also couldn’t smile for a photograph. Again, though, this only tells part of the story.

Societal expectations were heavy

One theory for the lack of old-timey smiles is that dental hygiene was terrible in Victorian times. Almost everyone had bad teeth — or possibly even no teeth at all. Perhaps, then, they didn't want to show the world their toothless grins? But many experts have dismissed this idea because rotten smiles would have been the norm, so no one would have been self-conscious about them. Yet the theory did hold weight with at least one prominent historian.

Undignified expressions

Angus Trumble, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia, told Time, that people didn't start smiling until dental work got a lot better. “People had lousy teeth if they had teeth at all, which militated against opening your mouth in social settings,” he said. Nicholas Jeeves wrote in the Public Domain Review that these societal views explain why Edwardian and Victorian cultures saw smiles as undignified.

Unfashionable poses

Jeeves wrote, “A walk around any art gallery will reveal that the image of the open smile has, for a very long time, been deeply unfashionable... A smirk may offer artists an opportunity for ambiguity that the open smile cannot... An open smile... is unequivocal, a signal moment of unselfconsciousness.” The famous humorist Mark Twain even weighed in on the subject — and his quip is enlightening.

"A silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever"

In the 1913 book Mark Twain and the Happy Island by Elizabeth Wallace, the author wrote, “I had noticed that [Twain] always assumed a dignified pose [in photographs], with a serious, almost severe expression of face.” When she asked Twain why this was, he famously responded, “I think 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.”

Smiling was for the poor

So why did the people of yore look down on smiling so much? According to some historians, it was because an unconcealed smile showed a certain lack of class. “In the fine arts, a grin was only characteristic of peasants, drunkards, children, and halfwits, suggesting low class or some other deficiency,” Kotchemidova wrote in her paper, noting evidence from the historian Fred Schroeder.

Preserving reputations and etiquette

This also extended to the idea of Victorian etiquette. Kotchemidova argued that this might actually have been a stronger reason not to smile than any technological limitation. “Etiquette codes of the past demanded that the mouth be carefully controlled; beauty standards likewise called for a small mouth,” she wrote in her paper. And this may be played an even bigger factor considering who could afford to have pictures taken in the early days of photography.

A luxury experience

After all, it cost a lot of money to hire a photography expert and all his equipment. Even those who could afford it saved the service for special occasions. “Not surprisingly, early amateur portraits published in Studio Light [one of Kodak’s photography magazines] showed a sense of unease and fright before the camera,” Kotchemidova wrote. “This nervousness had to be overcome if photography was to become popular.” And, of course, that's exactly what happened.

Immortality in photography

The photograph proved to be the perfect medium for those interested in posterity. For the people of times gone past, photography was used to preserve someone in picture form forever — whether they were alive or dead. Yes, there’s no greater example of this than the mostly pre-1900 tradition of post-mortem photography. And while it sounds grisly today, it is important to remember the context in which photography was born.

Preserving their image

In photography’s infancy, when a loved one passed away, their family would sometimes arrange a sitting for the deceased shortly after. The subject would be posed as if they were alive and their photo saved to keep their memory alive. The deceased would sometimes be alone and sometimes they would be photographed alongside their loved ones. It wasn’t just adults, either. 

Posing with the dead

Children and even pets were photographed like this. These photos were taken with such care and deliberation that it might be hard to tell the living relatives apart from the departed ones in old photos. But if you look closely the deceased are in sharper focus, simply because they didn’t move. This practice became less of a focus as people approached the 20th century, though.

Smiling was a sign of madness

But even then it took a while for the smile to catch on in photography. After all, it wasn’t just the lower classes who grinned like maniacs. It was also… Well, maniacs. Angus Trumble told Time in 2016 that people with big grins were “associated with madness, lewdness, loudness, drunkenness, all sorts of states of being that were not particularly decorous.”

Kodak started to change things

Kodak set about trying to change things as they began to push their personal cameras on the public. The company used slogans such as “Save your happy moments with a Kodak” and "Kodak as you go" to persuade people that it was okay to smile. "More pleasure at the moment," a 1908 ad read, "and afterward the added charm of pictures that tell the vacation story."

A new way to smile

The non-smiling began to fade out, and a new way of picture-taking came into vogue. In 1943 an issue of The Big Spring Herald even revealed the perfect cheat to getting a cracking smile in pictures. “Now here’s something worth knowing,” the article offered, “It’s a formula for smiling when you have your picture taken. It comes from former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, and is guaranteed to make you look pleasant no matter what you’re thinking.” 

Say, "Cheese!"

The article continued, “Mr. Davies disclosed the formula while having his own picture taken on the set of his ‘Mission to Moscow.’ It’s simple. Just say ‘Cheese.’ It’s an automatic smile. ‘I learned that from a politician,’ Mr. Davies chuckled. ‘An astute politician, a very great politician. But, of course, I cannot tell you who he was.’” People have theorized that the politician was actually Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Smiling Victorians

There are examples of old photography subjects grinning, though. In fact, if you're curious to see more, there’s a whole Flickr group dedicated to them called “Smiling Victorians.” Smiling wasn’t unheard of in other cultures, either. Just check out the famous 1904 image called “Eating rice, China.” The name says it all, but it’s a great example of how much difference a smile can make.

Humble but happy

“A Kiss beneath the Mistletoe” is an even older peek behind the Victorian curtain of seriousness. Taken in 1880, it shows an unnamed couple sharing a festive smooch. Both of them are smiling, and the lady especially has an ear-to-ear grin. They don’t look like the wealthiest pair in the world — so that conforms with one no-smile theory — but they do look happy! 

The loose elite

Some open-minded photographer in 1897 captured an excellent picture that has been titled “Goofing around.” It’s quite a departure from the largely stoic photos of the era given the subjects are clearly having a great time. All three subjects are balanced on a wooden beam having some fun. They’re well-dressed, too, proving not everyone in higher echelons was uptight in front of a lens. 

Breaking the stereotype

The smartly-dressed ladies and gentlemen in “Hats in the Side Yard” look like they’re enjoying themselves as well. Except for the guy in the back who’s wearing a scowl — albeit possibly a comical one. They seem to be laughing over one of the women taking the second man’s hat. None of them conform to the Victorian stereotype, though. 

Can't hold back

It appears that even in older photographs some occasions were too special to contain with dour expressions. Take this photo of a mother from the late Victorian period, for instance. Childhood was a precarious time back then, and this mom was probably just happy that her kid was happy. And to be fair, the baby looks pretty pleased with itself too.

Escape to the beach

These kids are getting away from it all and playing in the water, their joy clear for all to see. “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,” Trumble told Time. “What is radically different is public performance and public presentation.”

Photography influences portraiture

It's worth noting, too, that paintings started to be influenced by what was being seen in photography. As the 1800s became the 1900s, artists started to show their subjects with happier expressions or in situations that appeared to be more spontaneous than before. Trumble told Time that “people begin to smile in effervescent ways” in portraits from 1895 onwards — and this likely happened because of the movement in photography.

Rare but possible

That old saying about not judging a book by its cover can clearly be applied to these Victorian photographs, then. After all, history has noted that even leaders such as Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln were each known for their sense of humor. And if you look hard enough, you'll find photos of Lincoln with the hint of a smile — and one of Queen Victoria with an outright grin.