By the early 1840s, the daguerreotype process had advanced significantly from its cumbersome beginnings. Faster photographic plates and progressively brighter lenses had successfully reduced studio sitting times from a grueling fifteen minutes to under a minute—a duration brief enough for a subject to maintain a pleasant expression without excessive physical strain. Yet, remarkably, for the subsequent sixty years, almost nobody who sat in front of a camera smiled.
This curious historical phenomenon continues to puzzle contemporary observers who browse boxes of antique portraits at estate sales. Row after row of grave, closed-mouth faces stare back at the viewer with the unyielding seriousness of modern passport officers. The conventional explanation frequently offered by casual historians is that early photography required sitters to remain rigid for excruciatingly long stretches of time, during which a held smile inevitably deteriorated into an awkward grimace. While this explanation holds a kernel of truth regarding the very earliest days of the medium, it fundamentally fails as an accurate rationale for the decades that followed.
The grinning photograph is not the natural, default state of human imaging that technology finally unlocked after decades of struggle. Rather, the smiling snapshot is a cultural convention that belongs largely to the twentieth century—a phenomenon engineered by specific commercial entities, shifting social etiquette, and aggressive marketing campaigns.
The Myth of the Long Exposure
When Louis Daguerre officially made his groundbreaking photographic process public in 1839, the initial chemical plates were so extraordinarily insensitive to light that proper exposures required several minutes in optimal outdoor conditions. This technical limitation explains why Daguerre’s famous, early view of a Paris boulevard appears entirely deserted; everything that moved during the exposure vanished from the final plate, leaving only a pedestrian standing completely still to have his boots shined long enough to register.
At those primitive speeds, capturing a portrait was an immense challenge, often necessitating the use of heavy metal head clamps to keep the sitter entirely motionless. Under such grueling conditions, no one could realistically maintain a natural, relaxed grin.
However, that restrictive technological window was remarkably brief. By 1840, an innovative lens design developed by Josef Petzval gathered substantially more light, while chemical refinements—such as bromine fuming—exponentially increased the sensitivity of the plates. While Daguerre had originally calculated exposures in minutes, commercial portrait studios within just a few years were operating in mere seconds. When a photographic sitting is successfully reduced to five or ten seconds, the technical excuse regarding physical exhaustion largely evaporates. A person can comfortably hold a subtle smile for ten seconds without undue strain.
Consequently, the chronological timeline does not support the popular myth. Commercial portrait studios proliferated rapidly across Europe and North America throughout the 1840s and 1850s. By the time of the American Civil War, studio exposures were more than fast enough for candid expressions to be physically captured. Yet, the stern, unsmiling facial expression stubbornly persisted through the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, holding firm all the way to the turn of the twentieth century. Exposure length adequately explains the frozen faces of 1840, but it explains nothing about the frozen faces of 1895, an era when a subject could have easily grinned and had the plate record it cleanly.
The Historical Stigma of the Grin
Photography initially copied its artistic conventions directly from an older, well-established medium. Early portrait photographers did not invent an entirely new visual language; instead, they inherited three centuries of painted portraiture. In that deeply entrenched artistic tradition, the open, toothy smile was viewed as virtually taboo.
A survey of classical European art galleries reveals that broad grins are exceptionally rare in formal paintings. As cultural writer Nicholas Jeeves has noted in historical analyses of portraiture, the broad smile carried overwhelmingly negative associations for centuries. Traditionally, open grins belonged strictly to the lower classes, the lewd, the intoxicated, the foolish, and actors or entertainers. Respectable, middle- and upper-class individuals were expected to maintain a composed, dignified mouth.
This cultural rule was explicitly codified in contemporary etiquette books. In 1703, the French priest and educational reformer Jean-Baptiste de La Salle published an influential manual on Christian decorum, in which he specifically warned against individuals who raised their upper lips so high that their teeth became visible. He deemed this behavior strictly contrary to good manners. A wide grin was not interpreted as a sign of friendliness or warmth; rather, it was viewed as a dangerous lapse in personal self-control. In Victorian society, self-control was precisely the virtue that a formal portrait was meant to advertise to the world.
A formal portrait—whether rendered in oil paint or captured on a glass plate—functioned as a serious historical document reflecting an individual’s social standing. It projected status, moral character, and permanence, rather than capturing a fleeting, superficial mood. Politicians understood this dynamic instinctively. Abraham Lincoln, despite possessing a well-documented reputation as a master storyteller and humorist, maintained a uniformly grave expression in his photographic portraits because professional gravity was the entire point of the exercise.
Similarly, author Mark Twain—who appreciated wit as deeply as any American in history—reportedly drew a hard line when it came to the camera. According to contemporaneous memoirs, Twain insisted that a photograph was a vital historical document and argued that there was nothing more damaging to leave behind for posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed permanently in time. Whether that exact phrasing is apocryphal, the underlying sentiment represented the cultural mainstream. A smile was viewed as inherently frivolous, and frivolity was not a trait one wished to pass down to future generations.
Financial considerations further reinforced this strict code. Sitting for a portrait was an expensive and relatively rare undertaking, frequently representing a once-in-a-lifetime financial investment for an average family. Consequently, people approached the photographer’s studio with the same solemnity they brought to a painter’s studio: they donned their finest garments, meticulously arranged their posture, and composed a dignified expression fit for the family mantelpiece and the historical record. Nobody grinned for the ages.
Debunking the Dental Health Misconception
A frequently repeated explanation for nineteenth-century sternness is that people suffered from chronically poor dental hygiene, prompting them to keep their mouths shut to hide missing or decayed teeth. While this theory sounds intuitively plausible, historical reality complicates the narrative.
Dental care during the nineteenth century was undeniably grim by modern standards. Anesthetic dentistry was in its infancy, professional fillings were accessible primarily to the wealthy, and the standard medical remedy for a problematic tooth was extraction. However, this reality actually undermines the dental theory rather than supporting it. Dental decay was nearly universal across every socioeconomic class; therefore, bad teeth cannot logically explain why one group of individuals smiled while another did not, or why the cultural shift occurred so abruptly in the twentieth century.
Prominent historical figures, such as British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, served in high office into their eighties with missing teeth and were still celebrated for their personal charm. If poor dentition had genuinely been the primary deterrent to smiling, it would have suppressed smiles uniformly across all demographics. Rotten teeth were certainly real, but they were not the underlying mechanism governing photographic expressions.
The Commercial Revolution: How Kodak Engineered the Snapshot
The definitive transformation of the facial expression in photography was driven neither by chemistry nor by dentistry, but rather by deliberate commercial marketing. At the forefront of this revolution was the Eastman Kodak company.
Inventor George Eastman democratized photography by placing cameras directly into the hands of ordinary consumers. The first Kodak camera debuted in 1888 accompanied by the revolutionary advertising slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest." By 1900, the company introduced the Brownie camera priced at a mere one dollar, making it affordable enough to give to a child. Kodak reportedly shipped more than 150,000 units of the Brownie in its first year alone.
This drastic reduction in cost successfully moved the camera out of the formal studio environment and into the backyard, the beach, and the family vacation spot. Consequently, the photograph ceased to be a solemn, rare appointment and rapidly evolved into a casual activity performed on a pleasant afternoon.
For decades, Kodak engaged in a calculated marketing campaign to dictate what emotions belonged in those casual pictures. Media scholar Christina Kotchemidova has extensively documented how Eastman Kodak financed the photographic trade press and deployed relentless advertising that explicitly tied the camera to leisure, happiness, and recreation. Catchy slogans drove the emotional narrative: "Vacation days are Kodak days" and "Save your happy moments with a Kodak."
Beginning in the 1890s, the ubiquitous marketing figure known as the "Kodak Girl"—a young woman depicted traveling, playing, and sightseeing without a care in the world—modeled the ideal consumer behavior. Historian Nancy Martha West observed that these advertisements successfully sold photography as a mechanism for constructing a personal photo album entirely devoid of sadness, carefully edited down to holidays and bright smiles. Once the camera became culturally synonymous with fun, the appropriate facial expression in front of the lens naturally shifted to match.
The entertainment industry reinforced this cultural shift. Hollywood movie stars beamed brightly from the covers of popular magazines, while contemporaneous advertising taught the broader public to associate white teeth and a wide smile with overall health, vitality, and personal success. The traditional studio portrait had been designed to document who you were; the modern snapshot was rapidly becoming documentation of how good a time you were having.
The Origins of "Say Cheese"
The linguistic evolution of the photographic session mirrors this profound cultural reversal. Victorian portrait studios, intent on achieving that small, controlled, and decorous mouth shape, famously instructed sitters to utter the word "prunes," which naturally purses the lips into the tight configuration admired by the era.
Conversely, the modern photographic prompt achieves the exact opposite physiological result. Instructing a subject to say "cheese" forces a long "ee" sound that physically pulls the corners of the mouth wide apart and bares the teeth, artificially manufacturing a grin on command. The verbal prompt itself fundamentally inverted its purpose from suppressing a smile to producing one.
While the exact origin of the phrase remains slightly murky, historical research points to mid-century adoption. The earliest known print reference identified by researchers appeared in 1943 in a Texas newspaper, the Big Spring Herald, which published the tip under the headline, "Just say ‘Cheese,’ It’s an automatic smile." The newspaper credited the formula to a tip passed along by former diplomat Joseph E. Davies, who attributed it to an unnamed politician.
Regardless of its exact linguistic genesis, the trick had become common folk wisdom by the 1940s. Empirical measurement confirms the steady trajectory of this trend. Researchers associated with a comprehensive Berkeley University study processed nearly 38,000 American high school yearbook portraits spanning from 1905 to the 2010s using specialized facial analysis software to quantify smiling behavior. The resulting statistical curve demonstrates a steady, continuous climb out of the stiff-faced era of the early twentieth century, accelerating through the mid-century decades. Furthermore, the data revealed a persistent secondary pattern: across virtually every decade studied, women consistently smiled more frequently in their photographs than men.
Modern Implications and Legacy
Understanding this historical evolution demystifies the mechanics of contemporary portraiture. Professional photographers frequently note that instructing a nervous subject to simply "say cheese" often produces an unnatural rictus rather than a genuine expression, prompting portrait specialists to study the psychological difference between a manufactured grin and an authentic smile.
A century of aggressive commercial advertising successfully trained global populations to grin instinctively for the camera lens, even if it rarely taught individuals how to genuinely feel that emotion on command.
Ultimately, when modern individuals raise a smartphone camera and instruct a group to say cheese, they are executing a behavioral script originally written by early twentieth-century camera corporations. The stern, unsmiling strangers gazing out from antique-shop frames were not inherently sadder, less successful, or more secretive about their dental health than modern generations. They were merely adhering to an entirely different set of cultural rules—rules dictating that a face fixed permanently in time should project seriousness and gravity. Modern society, by contrast, dictates that a photographed face should project happiness. Both approaches represent deliberate human performances. Only one of them was successfully marketed to the masses.
