The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture
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-- Fernando Ramirez, Making tintypes
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.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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
This research seems quite insular.
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.
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.
Adding this for posterity: I have such a huge stupid smile on my face to help maintain my privacy.