Why so serious fotos

When we snap a profile picture today, part of the goal is to look cool or to document fleeting moments. But people didn't think about their Facebook page in the early days of photography. For them, photographs were a passage to immortality. That's especially evident in the tradition of postmortem photography. In that genre, a recently deceased person, child, or pet would be photographed as if they were still alive.

Begun in the early days of photography, it had largely — though not completely — petered out by But it reveals the mentality of the time: portraiture was used as a way to preserve the living for future generations. That meant the medium was predisposed to seriousness over the ephemeral. There's no better reflection of that idea than the words of Mark Twain — a man who made a living as a humorist and wrote stories about jumping frogs. Even he said , "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.

Mark Twain was a professional funny man, and this is how he posed for pictures. The fourth argument for why people in old photos frowned is one of the most compelling — though also the hardest to prove. It's possible that many people in the early s simply thought smiling was for idiots.

Nicholas Jeeves surveyed smiling in portraits for the Public Domain Review and came to the conclusion that there was a centuries-long history of viewing smiling as something only buffoons did.

Jeeves dismisses the alternative theory that bad teeth kept people from smiling — after all, if everybody had bad teeth, it probably wasn't a problem. Like any sweeping cultural thesis, it's a tough statement to prove, and the exceptions are abundant. For example, the Flickr group "Smiling Victorians" has 2, photos, and at least some of them show genuine grins. That alone is a significant counterargument. But the prevailing concept of old pictures as humorless relics seems on the mark and is confirmed, in some ways, by the need to make a special Flickr group for pictures that aren't dour.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the culture at large may have frowned on the smile, and it took a while to learn to love it. All that is what makes the photograph below, taken around , so striking. A picture from — yes, — of a man smiling while eating rice.

We don't know much about the photo itself. But it offers a perfect opportunity to examine why it seems like people in old photos never smiled. The clues might lie in photographer and subject. Photographer Berthold Laufer was an anthropologist, which meant he had a different mission than other photographers of his time — he sought to record life instead of pose it. That goal meant capturing a wider range of emotions. His rice-loving subject may have been willing to grin because he was from a different culture with its own sensibility concerning photography and public behavior.

Both of them were outsiders to the mainstream photographic culture. Together, they create a picture that's memorable even now. We don't know for sure why one man eating rice looked so happy — but we do know it led to a picture that can still make us smile today. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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Why people never smiled in old photographs. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Like in this depressing wedding photo from If your wedding photos look like this one from , your marriage is doomed.

Wikimedia Commons When we snap a profile picture today, part of the goal is to look cool or to document fleeting moments.

But then why was this man smiling? This man is definitely smiling: A picture from — yes, — of a man smiling while eating rice.

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