Say Prunes!

It’s a question we get asked a lot: Why don’t people smile in old photographs?

The answer may surprise you!

One reason is technical. The exposure time for early photographs was long: over 15 minutes in the earliest days of the portrait daguerreotype. Though this rapidly decreased to just over a minute as scientists fine-tuned the process, sitters had to remain still the entire time to avoid blur.

Neck braces and head clamps, such as this one, were commonly used to hold sitters in place. A natural smile could easily turn into a grimace when held for so long.

But it wasn’t just the technology. Just like now, social norms governed what kind of look you “should” have before the camera.

Much early studio photography in Europe and North America reflected the conventions of Western European portraiture, from the photograph’s setting and staging to the poses, gestures, and expressions of sitters.

Smiling widely and showing your teeth wasn’t a good look for anyone who wanted to be considered a serious person. As scholars such as Angus Trumble and Nicholas Jeeves have detailed, a broad grin was associated with lewdness, lunacy, drunkenness, and the lower classes. These associations persisted in much formal 19th-century portraiture.

In London, daguerreotypist Richard Beard instructed sitters to “say prunes” before their portrait was made, to achieve the perfect tart mouth—then considered the very image of decorum.

Open smiles were largely reserved for images of a more flirtatious nature. Combined with a soft gaze into the distance, a come-hither smile quickly became a staple of early photographic erotica.

Portraits of people baring their teeth could also be found in the pages of medical journals, as diagnostic tools for gum disease and syphilis. In the United States, the field of dentistry was rapidly formalizing in the mid-19th century, but dentures and hygiene treatment were available only to the privileged few. Unsurprisingly, people’s teeth in general weren’t that great.

With the advent of snapshot photography in 1888, Kodak marketed to the world a vision of photography as a joyous pursuit. In mass advertisements on the printed page and in the streets, the company’s “Kodak Girl” lived a life of leisure, her portable camera always at the ready on trips to the beach and the countryside.

Through such campaigns, Kodak helped shape a culture in which taking photographs was seen as a matter of pure pleasure. This changed the way ordinary people across the world engaged with the camera, whether at home, in the photo booth, or on holiday.