And Now For Something Totally Different: "Say Cheese!"

I've been doing some genealogy scrap booking the last few weeks. It's been fun to flip through the old photographs of ancestors long gone and chronicle their stories. It sets my imagination in flight to wonder what they were like and how they lived. But one thing has really been bothering me. Why do all my ancestors look so serious? I've never seen such a group of sober, sad-sacks. Were they all that stoically solemn?

My curiosity got the better of me, so I googled "smiling" and "photography" to uncover the secret of this mystery. It seems that during the early years of daguerreotype and tintype photography the accepted cultural norm was to never smile for a portrait. There were a lot of reasons, but here are just a few.

Apparently the earliest photography equipment operated on such a slow exposure speed that victims subjects were required to sit very still for a long period of time to ensure a sharp image. That's why so many early photographs were so blurry.  In fact, some traveling portrait photographers actually ran a pipe up the back of their subjects' clothing to assure that they didn't move. Can you say human popsicle? I give you exhibit A, a photograph of my great great grandfather, Albert Dieckmann, circa 1860's Iowa. Not a very comfortable looking man. Poor Grandpa Dieckmann does indeed look as if he's been skewered. And they say it takes a whole lot more facial effort to maintain a smile than it does an enigmatic stare. (This is a speculation I personally disagree with, but that's another story.)

There is also the theory that women especially did not smile in photographs before the 1930's because photo cards of smiling women were sold as porn. Hence, to display an open-mouthed, teeth baring smile was considered a vulgarity, especially in women.  Smiling head-shots didn't come into acceptance until the 1930's when movie stars made them glamorous. And then again, maybe some of these ancestors of mine just had really crumby teeth. Oral hygiene was probably not a huge priority on the open prairies of the 1800's.  They didn't have access to dentists nor thousands of dollars to throw around on orthodontics (thanks Mom and Dad.)

You have to also consider the possibility that these pioneers probably had a photograph taken of them only once in a lifetime. That would make such an occasion formal, to say the least. And truthfully, I've never seen any other photos of Grandpa Dieckmann, which points to that possibility.

I conferred with my friend, Angela, a professional portrait photographer, and her philosophy of why these pioneers didn't smile in portraits makes the most sense to me. She said, "It was the 1860's. Men were photographed in starched collars and wool suits. Women in twenty layers of clothing and hooped skirts. For God's sake, if you hadn't gone to the outhouse before your sitting, you'd be pretty miserable! What was there to smile about?"

I like Angela's expert opinion. I don't know if it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but...that's my theory and I'm stickin' to it.