With an ISO of about 1, it’s not uncommon for exposure times to fall in the 5-10 second range, even in broad day light. Smiling is not recommended for these long exposure times.
It's mentioned, just not in the context of early photography:
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.
Petapixel is all blogspam, they appropriate a lot from their sources, including rehosting photographs they don't have the rights to. The amount of content they take from their sources seems to go well beyond the typical "quote and link" blog format.
> By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.
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.
K-mart models smile, Prada models look haughty. Enough centuries have passed to doubt it's arbitrary convention. I think it's that smiling's associated with appeasement; in your role as high-class you're above appeasing the viewer.
In modern (as opposed to old) photography, smiling is often forced and awkward. As a serious photographer, I don't like posed photos at all, except from people who are comfortable and expressive while modeling. For most people, I prefer candids. And in my candid work (which isn't necessarily representative of the world at large), people tend to either look serious, or be laughing. Smiling is less common.
Thinking of your portrait subjects, even in the most formal portrait setting, as "modelling" is starting at the wrong end. Personally, I'd like to see the word model eradicated from the ordinary photographer's vocabulary; we have had the perfectly good subject and sitter to work with for longer than we've had photography. A model is just that — a stand-in for a "real" person (or persona). It's a job that people can be good or bad at, and when we think of our "real people" subjects as models, we immediately expect too much of them.
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.)
I agree that model work (and I don't have a problem with the colloquial meaning of "model") is fundamentally different from formal portrait. But that said, I do actual models and studio photography quite a bit.
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 in-laws are definitely not American (they're East Asian) and grew up as young children at the tail end of a rather serious war which killed several million.
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.
I had always assumed that it was due to the long exposure times of early photographic techniques such as the Daguerreotype.
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.
I've met a lot of people from a lot of different cultures, and all of them tend to smile in photographs. Can you list a few where smiling in photos is odd?
I've heard some Americans that work with Russians comment that they actually feel this way about smiling during the day at work. It's a sign that you are an idiot or not taking things seriously or something.
Hah, there's even an old Russian folk saying 'ulibka bez prichini - priznak durachini' which literally means 'smile without a reason indicates foolishness'. :)
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.
I don't like smiling at all in photos. It seems so fake, and unnatural. If they do insist on me smiling, I smile as big as I can to the extent it looks more scary than happy. "What? You wanted me to smile?!"
In what universe is having a big grin associated with being a humorist? The people in the top half of photos look more bored than serious, but Lincoln and Twain with their set jaws, intense stare, slightly tilted/twisted head and expressive, engaged faces look like they're about to say something either deadly serious or seriously funny.
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.
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."
Adding this for posterity: I have such a huge stupid smile on my face to help maintain my privacy.
-- Fernando Ramirez, Making tintypes
http://nondo.net/blog/?p=486