Don't Smile for the Camera: Expression in Early Photography

Editor's Introduction: In our effort to expand HJM's focus to include artistic and material culture, we are initiating a new "Photo Essay" feature which will appear in each issue. Here we offer selections from a photography exhibit on display at Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield. Because HJM is now available in several online academic databases, reproducing this exhibit in our pages makes it available to a much wider authence and preserves it for future generations of readers and researchers. Suzanne L. Flynt is Curator of Memorial Hall Museum, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, Massachusetts. Staged smiles have been part of our cultural consciousness for the past hundred years, so the solemn expressions and idiosyncratic poses in early photographs can be unsettling. Today, social convention dictates that we smile for the camera. Although we know they are facades, smiling faces reassure us of happiness. So when we view early photographs, we ask, why didn't people smile? Before sitters were prompted to "put on a happy face," a trend that began in the 1920s, many poses appear restrained, emotionally and physically. Sometimes they literally were. Long exposure times required one to remain motionless for up to twenty seconds, and some commercial photographers used iron head braces to keep their subject still. The grim faces in early photographs have been blamed on exposure times and head braces, but we are fully capable of staying still for that long, and the brace was more humiliating than painful. Was it because they had bad teeth? True, poor teeth were hidden behind many a closed mouth, but self-consciousness does not account for their expressions. Early photographs offer a window on how people presented themselves. Social convention frowned on excessive familiarity, and a smile, particularly a teeth-revealing smile, could be perceived as unbecoming or inappropriate. People accustomed to sharing their smiles only in domestic spheres were reluctant to be visually immortalized that way. Having a portrait taken was considered a serious matter and there was little spontaneity in the experience. Traditional portraiture had long prescribed a dignified pose with deportment, expression, clothing, and surroundings all carefully scripted. Once the camera was taken out of the studio and put into the hands of family and friends, smiles begin to appear in photographs. They, after all, want us to look happy. EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESSES Daguerreotypes, known for their mirror-like surface, are made on silver-coated copper plates. They were popular from the early 1 840s to about 1860. Ambrotypes, silver images in a collodion binder on glass, were widely produced between 1855 and about 1865. They are distinguished from daguerreotypes for their non-reflective surface. Tintypes, silver images in a collodion binder on lacquered sheets of iron, were prevalent from the late 1850s to about 1910. Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes are all processes that produce unique, one of a kind images. With the collodion process, one could also make a negative on glass, allowing practitioners to make multiple prints of the same image. Albumen prints (1855 to 1895) were distinctive for their glossy surface, high contrast, sharp details, and rich tones. Compared to more costly oil portraits, photography allowed people from all walks of life to have their likeness taken, at least once. Families had pictures taken for occasions such as marriage, the birth of a child, or a family reunion. When necessary, they also photographed their dead. Given the high mortality rate for children in the nineteenth century, it is understandable why so many parents had their children photographed. The Civil War created an unprecedented demand for small, inexpensive portraits to document those participating in the war effort as well as those left behind. During this time, photography became accessible to less privileged people, and portrait photographs of the poor or disenfranchised began to be taken. …