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Your wedding day is supposed to be the happiest day of your life.
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So why do these people look like they're going to a funeral?
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But it wasn't just formal occasions.
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It was teens, children, and lots of people with mustaches.
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Why didn't people smile in old pictures?
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The simplest explanation is exposure time.
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That's basically how much light a camera needs to record an image.
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The longer the shutter is open, the longer the film is exposed to light.
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Early cameras and film did take longer, so the thinking's that it was easier to hold a serious expression than a smile a smile if you were waiting minutes for your portrait.
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See this 1838 picture by Louis Daguerre?
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It's blurry because it probably took 10-15 minutes to take.
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All the people presumably moved during exposure — except for this bootblack and the guy getting his boots polished.
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You'd pose for a normal picture and a blurry one came out.
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But that problem was...fixed.
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Rapid advances in film technology, as well as commercial availability, made it easier to take pictures quickly.
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By the 1870s, bleeding edge photographers like Eadweard Muybridge were taking photographs that could split a second.
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To understand the real reason old pictures were so serious, you have to understand what portraits meant to people back then.
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Remember, before there were photos, portraits were…painted.
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They were time-consuming, long-lasting, and one-of-a-kind.
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That scarcity made the occasion pretty serious.
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And that mentality carried over to early photographs.
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Mark Twain, a professional humorist, said near the turn of the 20th century that...
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"There is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever."
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This is a guy who wrote stories about jumping frogs.
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But his viewpoint was typical.
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Take, for example, the oddly popular practice of posing dead bodies for "lifelike portraits."
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The photos weren't a snapshot.
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They were a passage to immortality.
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A record of one's existence.
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By looking at the exceptions, it's easier to understand why most portraits were so grim.
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There are lots of smiling Victorians, hiding in photo collections around the world.
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As early as 1853, Mary Dillwyn captured a boy's smile on camera.
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Victorians were not constantly miserable —they just usually got serious when they thought a portrait was being taken.
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As cameras became more common and photography improved, aesthetics changed and smiles returned.
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Later movies expanded the possibilities of recording real life.
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Portraiture broke free from the technology and aesthetics of painting.
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They discovered the possibilities of a new medium.
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People always knew how to smile.
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They just had to learn how to show it.
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So one of my favorite old photographs was somebody smiling, actually comes from an early 1900s anthropological expedition to China.
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It was taken by Berthold Laufer and the American Museum of Natural History has the photo.
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Which is absolutely perfect.
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This photo shows that the attitudes in old photographs really were about aesthetics, not technology.
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And if you didn't have an idea of a how a photo should look like, it could look like anything.
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And in this case, that is absolutely perfect