When I see old photos it seems like they’re mostly just doing it to document people’s faces as they are, they’re almost never smiling. When did people normalize having to convey “happiness” rather than just showing the person? Did it just happen when photography became cheaper/more accessible??
One explanation is that with old photography methods, a long exposure time was necessary to produce a good photograph. You had to sit still for minutes at a time, and any movement would cause a blur. People found it easier to sit still with a neutral expression than a smile. However, photography methods improved by the second half of the nineteenth century.
Another explanation is that before modern dentistry, many people had bad teeth and did not want them to be seen in photographs.
A third explanation is that early photography was modeled off of painted portraits, in which smiles by convention were not used much.
Smiling in photographs took off around the 1920s and 1930s.
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