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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

No one is smiling. Not even the kids. Maybe the woman in #20 is, who knows? I know in general 'old time' photos didn't have people smiling much - very posed pictures and stoic expressions. I wonder if they had any idea how much this would color our impression of them 100+ years later?

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I think smiling for a photograph must be some sort of social training that humans either take to or don't.

I, for example, still find it very difficult and unnatural to smile for photographs unless I am already smiling about something else and the picture is just a candid moment caught at that time.

I would imagine that this old picture taking process (3 separate pictures with different filters each time) took quite a bit of time and subjects had to be posed for a a longer period of time. It would be very difficult to hold a smile for that long, and especially in those early photography days when the smiling-for-pictures convention still hasn't been established.

Some of the pictures would have been impossible if the camera wasn't automatically swapping the filters very quickly. You can actually see the distortion is things moved around in the images and the colors separated, and there's even a sense of how fast they were moving. It seems to me that the pictures were taken in rapid succession indeed.

Quoth Wikipedia: "The exposure time of the frames is likely to have varied, even if the developed negatives were later on similar glass plates. In a letter to Leo Tolstoy requesting a photo session, Prokudin-Gorsky described each photo as taking one to three seconds, but, when recollecting his time with Tolstoy, he described a six-second exposure on a sunny day. Blaise Agüera y Arcas estimated the exposure of a 1909 photo taken in broad daylight to have had combined exposures of over a minute, using the movement of the moon as comparison."

reminds me of the story (not sure if it is true or not) of how the telephone revolutionised the world - prior to that, you had to be introduced to someone by a third party before you could speak to them; subsequent to the telephone the word 'hello' was invented. Or so the story goes

Myth busted: http://www.pitara.com/discover/5wh/online.asp?story=184

Thanks for the link. Would have been nifty if 'Ahoy!' had of caught on!

This is the reference which backs up my point, however it makes it slightly more eloquently- saying that 'Hello' was a way to cut across Social barriers which were much more rigid before the invention:

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=AgLDhOySfMgC&lpg=PA3...

Ps apologies for the mess

That's interesting, I never thought about that. It must've taken a great deal of willpower to not want to know everything about every new person you would talk to on other end of the line.

I imagine this would've been my first conversation with a random receptionist that's just trying to patch my call through: "Hello! We are speaking on the telephone! How's the weather over there!?"

Following that train of thought, I don't really remember my first time using the telephone, although I'm sure I was yelling the whole time.

It is probably a strange thing to say (i.e. common knowledge for others), but it only recently occurred to me that people develop a standard pose for photos. If you look at a family album or say Facebook or Flickr, and scroll through historic photos, the most "photogenic" people look almost identical. Those people will face in a certain direction with the same shape of smile and posture, it's almost freaky how identical they are! So it's obviously a practised/fake thing, that some learn to do while others remain oblivious. Back then, this concept would not have existed.

Early photos had very long exposures, with clamps used to hold people still. That may have set the expected look for a long time later.

It's not so much social training as it is the exposure time (which you also mentioned). Exposure time was so long that it was nearly impossible to smile in pictures. See for example the picture of the photographer himself at the stream - the running water in the river is a blur. I'm surprised the exposure time isn't that high in these pictures though. The shot of the workmen in the woodshop is distinctly modern by showing 'action'.

Photos required a very long exposure back then and a smile is hard to keep for what amounted to minutes. Keeping a neutral expression minimized movement and consequently blur resulting in an expensive re-shoot.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2011/1118/Louis...

> No one is smiling

Don't forget, this was an official photographer mission, sponsored by the Tzar.

I think most people on the photos were stressed enough to be asked to pose in front of unknown equipment, probably with some local officials present on the shoot.

EDIT: actually, there are nice smiling faces on http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_c... , where people are not posing.

The amount of smiling varies a lot between cultures, you can't correlate smiling with levels of happiness. Russians are known for not being big on smiling http://blog.properrussian.com/2011/05/why-russians-are-not-s.... From that article:

>> There is a popular Russian saying, “A laughter without a reason is a sign of stupidity”

There is a huge difference between smiling and laughing. Yeah, laughing out loud with no reason will seem stupid to anybody.

Joining the dots a little bit for you, here's another quote leading up to this point.

>> Russians need a particular reason to smile. You've heard good news and you smile to show that you consider this news as good.

There is a popular Russian saying, “A laughter without a reason is a sign of stupidity”

I'd read this, and spent a couple weeks in Russia last fall, and noticed the lack of smiling a lot when I was there. The thing that struck me about that mindset, and particularly that phrase (and others like it) is that it presumes the person looking at me knows if I have a reason to smile/laugh or not.

There's no doubt a lot of layers in the thinking that produced that (and similar) phrases which I can't unravel or fathom, but it's still strange all the same. To presume someone is stupid if you see them laughing is certain a cultural thing. Here (US) we'd probably just assume they were happy.

> To presume someone is stupid if you see them laughing is certain a cultural thing. Here (US) we'd probably just assume they were happy.

But on the flip side, a lot of people in the U.S. would assume someone is sad or angry if they are not smiling. There are examples in comments here.

This is probably not to do with photography but portraiture in general. Think about all the drawn and painted portraits you've ever seen.

Tolstoy's and Dostoyevsky's legacy lies heavy on our minds as well as perpetual hangover and bone ache from dancing with bears. ;)

It's very difficult to hold a smile very, very precisely. Any movement would've meant the colors would smudge. Not necessarily the reason why they're not smiling, but it's a possibility, I believe.

Agreed, but holding any pose is a challenge - kids sitting on the hill - they'd fidget and move. The water moves. The sun moves if you wait long enough. I wonder how many 'bad' photos there are from the early days of photos where people tried smiling and they had smudged faces.

I see a ghost in the smallest kid apart from the others in the hill. Changed positions between filters.

That's exactly it. The exposures were much longer then than now. It's also the same reason the bodies of water have the rainbow effect on their surfaces.

That chromatic effect is specifically the result of different intensities of light tracing different paths across a highly variable reflective surface (water) to the slightly different locations of each of the three separately filtered lenses of Prokudin-Gorskii's apparatus. It's an effect of space, not time.

I read somewhere that getting a photograph in those times was considered of great importance. The closest that you had back then to something like this was commissioning an artist to draw a portrait of yourself, very expensive and out of reach for common people. These are pictures mostly of rural folks, and even the ones with some kind of position like the emir were probably very poor. Therefore when somebody comes along and wants to take your photograph, you put on your best clothes, sit in a dignified pose and take it seriously, because it is a big deal.

And then, there's always some folks who like to deviate from the norm:

http://www.retronaut.co/2010/06/smiling-victorians/

I dare ya to scowl at these cheshires.

Russians don't walk around smiling, unless something good happens to smile about. In fact, smiling Americans look stupid grinning all the time.

As an American, the only time I see Americans grinning all the time is in stock photos. IRL we don't sit around eating salad and laughing all day.

Americans don't walk around being sad, unless something bad happens to be sad about. In fact, sad Russians look stupid wearing sad-face all the time.

Yeah, I don't think Americans look stupid. I was just explaining the cultural difference.

You might find this interesting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2375633

Two reasons:

1. Smiling for a camera is something you do because you want to be remembered that way (happy) -- it is like positive propaganda of yourself via media. Now, figuring out a way to spread a positive image of yourself via the photographic medium is actually a culturally sophisticated trick that we learn by imitating a social habit -- but someone sometime had to invent that habit first. What you are looking at are photos of people taken before that trick was invented (and even if the trick was already invented, the people portrayed wouldn't know about it because they likely had never seen a photo in their life).

2. Even if people knew that they will be remembered more positively if they smile, it took about three minutes to take the kind of photos Prokudin took, and they had to hold absolutely still. It is hard to hold a grin on your face for three minutes without changing it and thus ruining your portrait.

I'm not familiar enough with Russia specifically, but isn't smiling in photographs viewed as a weakness in some cultures?

Not just on Russian photographs. Dig up your grand-grand-parent photos and have a look - same expressions. It probably stems from the need to pose for photographs in daguerreotype times, back when they sat you in a chair and hold your head with a clamp, all because of an insanely long exposure that was required. Do that for 20-30 years and a somber expression on the photograms becomes a social norm, even if the technology moves forward.

At least one reason that smiling didn't persist for people of a certain time was that dental care wasn't the greatest, and people were reluctant to be captured with their poor teeth showing. Having had the opportunity to sort through thousands of studio photographs spanning most of the 20th century, I could almost date the age of the subject independent of the time the photograph was taken by seeing whether they were smiling or not.

In #22 you can see some people smiling. The one with the hat is certainly smiling.

Normally people are not smiling unless they are meeting someone or seeing something funny.

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